The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other
Lyttelton, London SE1
It's got 450 characters, 27 actors, is 105 minutes long, and has not a spoken word. The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other is a theatrical dare on the part of Peter Handke - the experimental Austrian dramatist, and collaborator with Wim Wenders, whose works include Offending the Audience. Can you give your spectators scarcely any information without boring them stupid?
On a grey and windy town square - Hildegard Bechtler's design is brutalist concrete with a clever touch of fantasy turret - people move around, individually; they are never a crowd, and they rarely interact. A couple of businesswomen, natty in black suits, have an impromptu game of football; a skateboarder glides on, falls off and (it's a kind of joke: he is, after all, in a theatre) quickly checks to make sure that no one has seen him; a line of old gents shuffle on with a variety of wobbles and tics, and almost immediately shuffle on again, recycled as a parade of military veterans; a queue (for what, we don't know) forms - one of the women in it frees her hands by holding an envelope in her teeth. Someone jogs in - and off.
In James Macdonald's wonderfully detailed production you see true bits of human behaviour that have never been put on stage before: these strangers duck and dive around each other like fish in the ocean or birds in the sky. You also see the worst sides of the avant-garde: Handke may want to turn a traditional play inside out, and resist the idea of meaning, but he chucks in some corny anti-meaning bits: mingling amid the citizens are Abraham and Isaac, Puss in Boots and Papageno; towards the end there's a very clunky coup.
Macdonald, who specialises in exquisite productions of skinny works, has reached his apogee here. He's directed a fascinating evening, which doesn't make a point.
