How do we connect with those who came before us? History tells us much about how people lived, even how they thought. But how they felt remains largely lost to us. Michael West's magnificent new version of Johannes Von Saaz's 15th-century text provides a direct conduit to the heart. It shows us that grief then and grief now are one and the same. The disaster of a ploughman who lost his wife in childbirth six centuries ago is my disaster too.
Von Saaz's piece (this is not a play, rather a series of chapters or a discourse between the recently widowed farmer and Death) was written at a time when death was always just over your shoulder. Between 1342 and 1350 over one-third of Europe's population was wiped out by the Black Death. Death during childbirth was commonplace and infant mortality devastatingly high. People didn't have a life expectancy so much as a death expectancy.
While we today have grief counsellors, the poor ploughman has only his debate with Death: three no-nonsense impassive figures - regretful civil servants who are only doing their job. That aside, mourning seems to have changed very little down the centuries.
Deborah Bruce's fine production takes the idea of mankind "living and dying in the blink of an eye" and uses it to unlock a text that is certainly unlike most playscripts, although there were moments during this 70 minutes when I was much reminded of Sarah Kane's Crave in both form and content. Bruce presents each "chapter" like a photo, or perhaps more like a medieval tableaux or painting. In the early part, the ploughman's dead wife is glimpsed like a sleeping beauty behind a frosted window pane.
As a theatrical experience it doesn't entirely work, not least because some of the theological and philosophical arguments remain obscure. But this brief offering is more than just a curio. Its pain is too raw and real. It came straight from the heart: Von Saaz began writing Death and the Ploughman the day after the death of his own wife, Margherita, who died in childbirth on August 1, 1400.
Until November 23. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
