Created by Ella Hickson and sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, Anna is both an audio experiment and an investigation of the lies and suspicion surrounding life in communist East Berlin. While undeniably intriguing, at 65 minutes it feels too cryptic for its mighty subject and, since we listen to the dialogue through headphones and view the action through a glass fourth wall, there is a double sense of detachment.
The play takes place in 1968 in the East Berlin apartment of Anna and Hans Weber, who are holding a party to celebrate the latter’s promotion. We hear the play through the ears of Anna, even when she is behind a bedroom door, which means that many of the guests’ exchanges go undetected. But this makes sense because the focus is on Anna’s horrified realisation that her husband’s new boss, who is at the party, is the same man who was implicated in her mother’s wartime death at the hands of Russian soldiers.
This has strong echoes of Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, in which a former political prisoner confronts her sadistic captor. But in Hickson’s play, the moral dilemmas this creates get subsumed in a mixture of Le Carré-like spy thriller and an exploration of Anna’s capacity to survive different political systems. Even if this is too much intellectual cargo for a short play to carry, Natalie Abrahami’s production and the Ringhams’ sound design are technically brilliant, allowing us to detect the minutest detail such as the popping of the buttons on Anna’s dress.
Phoebe Fox credibly leaves us unsure whether Anna herself is suffering from paranoid delusions or is an instrument of revenge. There is substantial support from Paul Bazely as her bewildered husband, Max Bennett as his equivocal boss and Diana Quick as the ostracised wife of a political renegade. But this evening is a celebration less of acting than of the possibilities of binaural sound and, fascinating as that is, it is not the main reason I go to the theatre.
