Remember La Ronde? A character from one scene journeys into the next to create an erotic daisy chain. Dejan Dukovski, a young Macedonian dramatist, has had the ingenious idea of applying the same technique to urban violence. The result is Powder Keg, written in 1994 and already turned into a prize-winning movie, makes a suitably explosive start to the Gate's new season.
Dukovski's 11 violent vignettes take place on a narrow, furniture-strewn traverse stage. At one end of the room an old man in a bar describes a brutal attack in which he lost three toes and a testicle. It transpires that he is drinking with his assailant who claims that the action was retaliatory and who then turns up in the next scene to harass a young tearaway who has damaged his car. And so the violence goes on ad infinitum. But one of Dukovski's key points is that the person who threatens violence often becomes its victim. In one brilliant scene a young punk menaces and abuses the occupants of a stationary bus only to get his comeuppance from the driver for not having bought a ticket.
Violence, implies Dukovski, takes many forms: revenge, suicide, self-defence or even simply verbal and emotional rejection. By setting the action in bars, buses, trains and parks, he also reminds us that it is as ubiquitous as it is infectious. If I have any reservation it is that the theme becomes diluted as the action spreads to New York where a rootless Macedonian exile hurls beer bottles at a blinking neon sign while claiming "I don't give a monkeys about the Balkan tragedy."
But, for the most part, the play is a pungent reminder of the viral nature of a violence that, in Thomas Browne's colloquial English version, could be happening in Scunthorpe as well as Skopje. Philippe le Moine's production also intelligently stylises the physical brutality without diminishing its visceral impact and, in a cast of six, there are particularly good performances from Daniel Cerqueira as a burly prison baron and from Danny Nussbaum as a knife-brandishing public-transport psychotic. The wit of the play, however, lies in its Schnitzlerian form which suggests that violence today is as catchingly circular as sex in fin-de-siecle Vienna.
Until October 16. Box Office: 0171 229 0706
