Theatre review: Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books considered unfilmable and unstageable, which inevitably means people have attempted both. The latest to try a stage version are a company named after the novel's recurring phrase every time anyone mentions death: So It Goes. It's a refrain that comes from the Tralfamadorians, aliens who abduct Billy Pilgrim (Patrick McAndrew) in the late 1960s on the day of his daughter's wedding, and take him to their own planet to be exhibited at a zoo. The aliens experience the world four-dimensionally, meaning time isn't linear to them, so death or even the destruction of the universe - which they know they'll be accidentally responsible for but can't or won't change - aren't notable events since every other moment still exists simultaneously. He's eventually returned to Earth after a long time, but also to the exact moment he left it.

As a human he can't experience time in the same way as his captors but he does inherit a version of it, jumping backwards and forwards within his own life, hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

It's a conceit that sets up the non-linear storytelling device that takes us back to various events in Billy's life, particularly the biggest source of his trauma during the Second World War. Not so much his time in a prisoner-of-war camp, but what happened next when the Americans were taken to Dresden to be put to work. They're staying in the titular slaughterhouse when the infamous and controversial Allied bombing raid flattens the city and its largely civilian population. As one of the few survivors, Billy is also left responsible for dealing with what comes next.

Billy's experiences cleaning up the bodies and the knowledge that his own side had done this under the guise of being the good guys will haunt him for the rest of his life, and adopting the Tralfamadorians’ zen-like approach is his way of coping. Eric Simonson’s adaptation initially uses a lot of narration to get around the tricksy storytelling style, and Alex Crook, Ethan Reid and Sofia Engstrand, playing all the supporting characters, also take turns as Vonnegut himself blurring the lines between his own experiences in Dresden and the fiction he’s built around them.

Increasingly director Douglas Baker, also the production’s video designer, uses the latter to expand the story’s world, and the four-strong cast spend a lot of time interacting with projections and animations. Just as the actors’ performance style jumps between the naturalistic and the cartoonishly grotesque, so Baker’s video and Calum Perrin’s audio takes in everything from pre-recorded material to toy soldiers being projected onto the screen to represent the German captors.

Leaning into the absurdity and confusion is probably the wisest approach rather than trying to make something linear out of the shifting storylines, and where it’s most successful is in the way moments of strange twisted wisdom come out of the chaos, often in the sci-fi books of an obscure author (Crook,) beloved by Billy’s mental hospital roommate (Reid.) The most notable of these is probably the story of another alien race that comes to Earth to correct the way the Bible tells its message, to stop the ease with which people can twist its meaning.

I didn’t think I’d read Slaughterhouse-Five but not long into Simonson’s version it started to feel so familiar I think I must have done, decades ago. Not recently enough for it to be an easy show to get a handle on: Its frenetic energy and leaping from storytelling style to storytelling style is impressive but also exhausting to watch (or maybe the weather didn’t help, although at least The Little is now air-conditioned.) It also feels like it dips its toe into the horrors that inspired the story rather than really confronting them, but then maybe that’s the point of the central character’s coping strategy.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Eric Simonson, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, is booking until the 4th of July at Southwark Playhouse Borough’s Little Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Henry Hu.