“Hello. So the world seems to be spiralling towards disaster again,” begins the teacher protagonist in Christopher Hampton’s play, adapted from Ödön von Horváth’s 1937 novel about life under Nazism.
You can hear the siren call of contemporary resonance in a story where minor crimes enable major ones and moral inertia produces insidious, malign results. The atmosphere of steady decay in Stephanie Mohr’s production suits the elegantly ravaged Coronet. But for all its surface relevance, this is a coarse piece of theatre, with some startlingly crass acting.
Early on, the unnamed teacher (Alex Waldmann) is disciplined for telling his borderline-feral class of young Germans that Africans are human too. Then he has to take them off to camp in the mountains, where the starving locals are regarded as prey, and a murder is committed. The teacher is tangentially implicated, but stays silent too long.
We get the message: the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Justin Nardella’s set is ringed by chalkboards on which the cast scrawl ominous slogans and images. The stage ends up littered with dolls’ heads, accordions and sticks, tangential references to genocide, populism and fascism. Sonorous music surges and fades. Women are either mothers or whores. We are being given a solemn warning from history, underlined several times.
But Waldmann’s emotional spectrum runs only from wry amusement to peevish exasperation, and some of the acting elsewhere is downright cartoonish. The scenes in a bar between the teacher, yet another prostitute and a mad, ranting drunk nicknamed Julius Caesar are overextended and embarrassing.
Hampton is rightly celebrated for restoring Horváth’s reputation as a dramatist in this country. But his adaptation of this final novel — published just before the exiled Horváth was killed by a falling branch in Paris, aged 36, in 1938 — does him few favours.
Until October 19 (020 3642 6606, thecoronettheatre.com)
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