The striking premise of Serbian writer Biljana Srbljanovic's play is that its four adult actors play children playing adults, acting out scenes of everyday horror they endured in Belgrade during and after the Kosovo war.
Parents and son play out a family dinnertime, slurping invisible soup using carrots as spoons, as the father parrots state propaganda about following the rules, walloping the son with his belt when he talks back. A terrified, filthy orphaned girl enters their environment, and they adopt her as the family dog. Each vignette ends with the parents dying; then we see them, in sickly red light, bounce up and regroup for the next scene.
This is a challenging play both because the subject matter it presents is upsetting, and because it does not talk down to audiences but relies on them to work out the concept and the message on their own. The idea of the naturalistic plot is replaced by an intellectual and emotional journey taken by the audience, as it slowly pieces together the terrible reality that Srbljanovic is describing: a society fragmented and ruined by violence.
Rachel West's production for B*spoke Theatre Company is as pared-back and uncompromising as the script (translated by Rebecca Rugg). Paul Keogan's smart set lines the floor with dirty cardboard and papers the walls with children's drawings of warplanes and bombed-out houses. The four fine performers (Andrew Bennett, Pauline Hutton, Mary Murray and Rory Nolan) are committed and effective as they play the layers of the story, rarely dipping into cloying adults-playing-kids acting tics. An occasional problem is that physical points are not underlined clearly enough: it is hard to discern at first that the parents come back from each "death" wearing scars and bloodstains.
B*spoke and West are doing brave work here, trying to create a context for important European plays in a theatre culture whose politics are still very much defined by national issues.
· Until July 2. Box office: 353 1 881 9613.
