After Ceaucescu was deposed there was a flurry of interest in Romanian theatre, leading to the formation of a British-Romanian exchange programme known as Noroc. One of its most memorable exports was an off-kilter production of Eugene Ionesco's the Bald Prima Donna by the Hungarian-Romanian director Gabor Tompa. It's great to see Tompa back, working with actors from the Northern Stage Ensemble on another Ionesco, this time in English - which makes it even harder to understand.
They say that moving house is one of the most traumatic events you can experience, and that is without Ionesco taking care of arrangements. The story of The New Tenant involves little more than a man taking an unfurnished flat, then furnishing it. But it all happens with such a soft, hallucinatory grace that the sequence seems to embody a profound truth: I just have no idea what it is.
You could approach the New Tenant on a variety of levels: as an allegory of human neuroses; as a parable dissecting the capitalistic urge to surround oneself with useless possessions; even as a piece of modern dance - the sequence in which the removal men whirl in and out to the party scene from La Traviata is a masterpiece of absurdist choreography.
What is never in doubt is the quality of Tompa's conception, nor the denuded beauty of Helmut Stuermer's set. Francisco Alfonsin brings a morose bearing to the role of the tenant; Joanna Holden prattles admirably as the landlady; and, as a pair of bowler-hatted, Geordie removal men, Jim Kitson and Mark Calvert remind me in their interplay of Ant and Dec. Now that really is strange.
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