Premiered during the Yugoslav wars, the action of David Greig’s first full-length play is located in an imaginary border town, claimed by one country, then by another; reclaimed and claimed again: “History washed over us,” explains an introductory chorus.
Amanda Stoodley’s dull-toned set is minimal but expressive: a neon sign indicates a bar; an armchair and TV suggest a home. The whole is fronted by a stretch of railway line. David Bennion-Pedley’s lighting and David Shrubsole’s sound conjure trains passing – they do not stop here any more. It is a space of arrivals and departures, of redundancies and opportunism, of fear of the other mingled with hope of salvation through the other.
Short scenes deliver snapshots of situations. The town’s only factory closes down. Two refugees (or economic migrants?) arrive at the station. Having nowhere to go, they stay. Redundant workers drink and rant. A local lad turned travelling entrepreneur returns bearing vodka and stories of the magic of the transformation of the value of goods across borders.
The railway staff and the refugees slowly form friendships. The redundant workers form ideas about who is to blame for their misfortunes.
Characters, written as ciphers to function for the plot, are powerfully embodied by the eight-strong ensemble – in particular, Robert Pickavance as the sage-like refugee Sava, Jo Mousley as his trauma-closed daughter, gradually opening to hope and Tessa Parr as the Station Assistant, dreaming of distant towns. Those who can get away from the town do; those who will not or cannot are caught up in violence. Escalating developments are precisely modulated by director James Brining. Greig’s 1994 Mitteleuropean nowhere-in-particular could easily be somewhere in the Europe that still includes us today.
