The Young Vic is clearly fascinated by scapegoats. After the ritual murder of an Irish tramp in Afore Night Come, we now have the persecution of a supposed Jew in Max Frisch's Andorra. Although the message may still be pertinent, Frisch's 1961 moral fable now seems unduly protracted. Society may not have improved, but audiences are much quicker on the uptake.
Frisch sets the action in a small, peaceful country, Andorra, not unlike his native Switzerland. His hero, Andri, is a young man brought up in the belief that he is a Jewish orphan, rescued by the local teacher from the neighbouring, anti-Semitic "Blacks". In reality, he is the teacher's own illegitimate son. But Andri accepts his given Jewish identity and finds himself being compartmentalised, patronised or abused by the native Andorrans. Even when the truth is revealed, he cannot shed his presumed "difference", and inevitably becomes the prime victim when the Blacks invade Andorra.
Frisch's message is perfectly clear: not simply that anti-Semitism reveals itself as much through categorisation as persecution, but that we create false images of other people instead of embracing their contradictions. No one could deny the truth of that, or the horrific power of the final scene, in which the masked, shoeless Andorrans parade in front of the silent Jew-detector. But Frisch's dramatic method belies his message. He attacks the Andorrans for the way they impose a false identity on Andri, yet his play offers a series of generic types, known simply as the Priest, the Doctor and the Innkeeper. If the play is about the need to understand human complexity, you rather wish that Frisch had practised what he preached.
Inexplicably, director Gregory Thompson also jettisons Frisch's precise framework. In the interludes between the 12 scenes, the Andorrans take the witness stand to disclaim any responsibility for Andri's death, rather in the manner of Adolf Eichmann during his trial. Thompson retains the lines but abandons their judicial context, thus depriving the play of its retrospective irony. He also tends to underline what is already italicised, so that when Andri cries, "Now all they need is a scapegoat", he extends his arms in a crucified posture.
The best feature of the evening is Francis O'Connor's set, in which a tiled square is surrounded by shuttered apartments, suggesting myriad prison cells. There are also good performances from Alec Newman as Andri, Jack Shepherd as the Teacher and Aoife McMahon as his daughter. But Frisch's play now feels like an overextended parable that doesn't so much develop as simply restate its unambiguous central idea.
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