Kerstin Specht's play, Marieluise, about German playwright Marieluise Fleisser, author of the Ingolstadt plays, was performed at the Gate in 2004, and there is a similar poetic intensity about this play set in the greenhouses of a southern European country, a place that feeds Europe with its hothouse tomatoes and feeds the dreams of the poor Muslims who live just across the water and who long for new lives. But reality grinds them into the dust pretty fast.
Sami and Ali are two such young men; illegals who wanted to make new, shiny European lives for themselves but who now lie on broken pallets, their bodies riddled with police bullets. They may be dead, but for corpses they are astonishingly chatty, reliving their boyhood friendship, the time they went looking for the tortoise and the way life ended for them somewhere between the cucumbers and courgettes. They observe that in death they are beyond the reach of more disaster. They observe that, as in life, they are just rubbish, carrion for the vultures of memory that circle around them, for those who want to use their lives and deaths for their own ends.
This is a hot sweaty hallucination of a play. With its almost silent chorus of beaky, black-garbed women and its large corrugated fence, the play is consistently strange, but not always quite so consistently interesting in Elgiva Field's production, largely because of a lack of intensity and some uncertainty in some of the performances. On the page it has a bitter rind of humour that doesn't really come over in performance, except in the exchanges of the dead Sami with his mother, a woman who thought when she sent her son to Europe that she was sending him to paradise. "You are," she tells his corpse, "a whole new disappointment to me."
· Until July 15. Box office: 020-7978 7040.
