There is no such thing as a minor Howard Barker play. He packs more into the slenderest dramas than most playwrights manage in an epic. His latest has one character, but it embraces humanity in extremis.
Und is about the collaboration of the desperate. Of the fox with the hound. The weak with the strong, victim with executioner. At its simplest it explains why you see black women reading the Sun. At its most profound it peers into the darker recesses of the mind and uncovers something unpalatable but true: the masochist whose behaviour empowers the sadist, our desire to survive at any price and the saving of face and the loss of the soul .
Who can blame us? Barker doesn't, offering instead a kind of piteous compassion for his anti-heroine Und, swinging on the pendulum of uncertainty, dressed in her finery - a ball gown surprisingly close to skin itself - anxiously awaiting the arrival of her guest. A nice tea for two, prettily arranged on the tray. But the tea is cold, the corrugated iron fence menacing and the guest has begun attacking the very structure of the dwelling. The bell is pulled incessantly. The walls resound with a torture of noise.
In this psychological war, in which the outcome is assured, Und sides not with the oppressed but with her oppressor. Like the calf at the slaughterhouse door, she turns seductive. She turns her contempt not upon her torturer but upon herself. In deploying such a strategy she spares herself humiliation but also colludes in her own extermination.
Barker's own production, designed by Tomas Leitzig, more as an installation rather than a theatre set, begins cool and brittle and gradually turns up the heat, so that in the end Melanie Jessop's performance is like a contained inferno.
