Theatre review: Nachtland

Despite an incredibly irritating social media publicity campaign (who were those messages raving about the show months before it opened even meant to be from, anyway?) I've been looking forward to the Young Vic's Nachtland: Marius von Mayenburg's dark satire (translated here by Maja Zade) has a viciously clever premise, and Patrick Marber's production has a great cast. The resulting evening is an entertaining one, but a frustrating one as well. The audience enter to Anna Fleischle’s set absolutely covered in dusty old props, which the cast clear away before the action starts: Siblings Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Philipp (John Heffernan) are clearing out the house of their recently-deceased father, bickering about who looked after him when he was alive and whose story it is to tell even as they narrate it to the audience.

Theatre review: Trust

My first visit to the Gate since Ellen McDougall took over as artistic director, and as soon as you get into the building you can tell she’s kept one of her predecessor’s innovations and taken it to the next level: Christopher Haydon introduced the idea of commissioning artists to decorate the staircase and front-of-house with artworks that reflected the current production, and Jude Christian’s production of Trust, designed by Bethany Wells, is in its entirety an art installation. Wells has turned FOH into a building site, the future home of some luxury development, while sound designer Ben Ringham has installed a recording of a Spanish language lesson in the toilets. Christian’s own installation is, essentially, the director herself – she’s set up a bedroom at the edge of the auditorium and has moved into it for the duration of the play’s run, and also appears in the show as one of the performers alongside Pia Laborde Noguez and Zephryn Taitte.

Theatre review: The Ugly One

It’s nine years, almost to the day, since I saw the Royal Court’s original production of Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, and it’s a show I remember surprisingly well. This revival is directed by Roy Alexander Weise, who after last year’s The Mountaintop seems to have similar taste to me in plays from the last decade or so; and I was particularly interested to see what he did with it because the original staging is one thing that particularly stood out in my memory – because it was virtually non-existent. Well Weise hasn’t followed suit, but his production’s still comparatively minimal despite the ubiquitous video element – here it gets projected onto Loren Elstein’s raised stage floor, a sort of enormous desk that sometimes doubles as a platform for the public presentations its characters make. And public presentations are something Lette (Charlie Dorfman) isn’t allowed to make: He’s invented a revolutionary (within his industry; otherwise stultifyingly dull) new plug for car-manufacturing machinery, but his company insists his assistant Karlmann (Arian Nik) present it to customers.

Theatre review: The Dog, the Night and the Knife

I never know quite what I'm going to get with Marius von Mayenburg, some of whose work I've found really memorable, other times it's left me cold. I think it comes down to how much directors of English-language productions are willing to embrace the heavy directorial touch common in European theatre, and which von Mayenburg is probably writing for. Translated, as usual, by Maja Zade, The Dog, the Night and the Knife falls somewhere in the middle in its UK premiere production at the Arcola. M (Michael Edwards) finds himself in a dark alley in a city he doesn't recognise. All he remembers of his recent past is that he had mussels for dinner - in fact this may be all he remembers of his entire life. A man in the alley is looking for his lost dog, then suddenly pulls a knife on M and gives him a flesh-wound; but in self-defence M grabs the knife and fatally stabs him.

Theatre review: Eldorado

When Wogan ended in 1992, the BBC replaced it with the much-publicised soap Eldorado, set among British ex-pats in Spain. I don't remember much about it except there was a man's naked arse in the first episode, but despite that it became a famous flop. It was taken off-air a year later, ironically just as it was starting to find an audience. Still, it meant Jesse Birdsall was now available to make Bugs, another show considered a bit of a laughing stock, but which actually did quite well for the Beeb in international sales. None of this has anything to do with the play of the same name at the Arcola's main house. Did the soap have some Germans in it? This Eldorado is written by a German - Marius von Mayenburg, whose other plays include The Ugly One, The Stone and Fireface, all of which I've enjoyed.

Theatre review: Fireface

The James Menzies-Kitchin Award returns for a second year to its current home in the Young Vic's Clare auditorium, where this year's winner Sam Pritchard has chosen to revive Marius von Mayenburg's Fireface, in a translation by Maja Zade. A twisted look at the frustrations and raging hormones of adolescence, von Mayenburg's play takes us into the home of a disfunctional family, whose laissez-faire parents are unwilling or unable to see how far their children's angst differs from the norm. Olga (Aimeé-Ffion Edwards) is impatient to leave her childhood behind, and when her younger brother, pyromaniac Kurt (Rupert Simonian,) starts to have his own sexual awakening, she decides to take a more hands-on approach to educating him in such matters than is usual for a sister. When an outsider breaks into the siblings' private world, Kurt's love of fire and explosions reaches a new level.