What does it mean to be a rootless citizen of nowhere, forever haunted by the past? That is one of the questions raised by Judith Burnley’s debut play, which crams a good deal of European history into 80 minutes and which, even if it sometimes puts ideas before surface plausibility, is unafraid of big issues.
The setting is a north London flat in 1991. Its occupant is Otto, an elderly Jewish musician and former audio expert who lives in widowed solitude listening to Brahms piano quartets. His peace is shattered by the arrival of an aristocratic German woman, Lottie, who claims she has been sent by Otto’s Israel-based daughter to act as his carer and to help him recover from a stroke. Otto, understandably furious, sees Lottie as an unwanted intruder and dubs her “Little Nazi”, but over time we realise both characters are, in a sense, permanent exiles with more in common than they realise.
Some plot elements don’t add up. You wonder why Otto’s daughter didn’t forewarn him of Lottie’s arrival. You also start to speculate on why even an Anglophile such as Lottie, brought up on Winnie the Pooh, which she quotes extensively, would put up for so long with such abusive treatment by her patient. But at the heart of the play lies a serious debate about the nature of guilt and reparation. Both Otto and Lottie, in their different ways, have to overcome the guilt that accompanies survival of wartime suffering. Burnley is also asking whether money can ever compensate for a nation’s tyranny or whether the only true reconciliation is to be found in individual hearts and minds. At a time when so many plays are obsessed by local identity, this one is blessedly and unashamedly European.
Alice Hamilton directs with her customary care. Clive Merrison gives us all of Otto’s tetchiness, cussedness and determination to show that one can, through longtime residence, acquire a deceptive mask of Englishness. Issy van Randwyck is even better as Lottie in that she effortlessly conveys the character’s poker-backed upper-class origins and willingness to abase herself because of the sins of the past. Burnley, a novelist turned playwright, needs to learn to let her characters off the leash, but there is enough here to make one hope for more.
- At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 11 November. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
