'Address Unkown, by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, Soho Theatre

‘Adressant Unbekannt. What a darkness those words carry! How can she be unknown? She has gone into some sort of void…’

Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s 1938 novel ‘Address Unknown’ has long been one of the most uncelebrated pieces of World War Two Literature. Written on the eve of Nazi total rule, the novel follows a series of written exchanges between close friends Martin Schulse and Max Eisenstein: the latter a German Jew living in California, and Martin, his German business partner, residing in Berlin.

On stage, the distance between these two settings is achieved through the duplicated settings of two studies. The first, slightly more colourful and modern representing the evolving world of America, and the other darker, archaic and symptomatic of a panic-stricken struggling Germany in the early 1930s. Within the few meters of stage at the Soho Theatre, the plays set designer, Katie Lias, successfully represents the polar worlds straddling the Atlantic Ocean.

Ten minutes into the Steve Marmoin’s adaptation of the novel, the audience twitches; after the third verbal exchange of correspondence between Martin (Jonathan Cullen) and Max (Simon Kunz), there is a united doubt over what can be achieved with a script that shyly diverges very little from the original novel. This twitch, however, is swiftly replaced by a collective wince and stiffening after the mention of one odious name: Hitler. The play transforms…

What begun as letters of love, friendship and solidarity rapidly become those of disbelief, pride and hatred. After the revelation of Max’s missing relation in Berlin; the moment that gives the novel its title; the audience enters a moral abyss. As the they turns their heads from one side of the stage to another, the worlds of California and Nazi Germany become further and further apart. Transported to a world where moral righteousness is evaporated within one simple arm salute, Marmoin’s play is vibrant in its representation of betrayal.

Far from shocking in its conclusions, the play illuminates the power of Hitler’s ideology even before its most potent period. Cullen and Kunz present with full force the conflicts of Nazi Germany, and how the poisoning of friendships can take place through the simple acknowledgement of two sinister words: Adressant Unbekannt...

'Our Town', By Thornton Wilder at The Kings Head Theatre

‘Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense…’

In a plight to challenge what he saw as the ‘soothing’ content of theatre in the late twenties, Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ attempts to strip away the ‘layers of nonsense’ surrounding humanity. 

True to this vision, Tim Sullivan’s adaptation successfully captures the trivial and mundane acts of the villagers of fictional New Hampshire village, Grover’s Corner, and encourages the modern audience to celebrate and affirm the everyday. 

Relayed in three acts, the play progressively transports its audience twelve years through village life, from teenage tantrums to the after life, and didactically emphasizes the importance of appreciating what usually goes unnoticed in our day to day existence.

The stage manager (Simon Dobson), acts as the plays narrator, at times interrupting the play with ‘that’s enough of that’ and fast forwarding the action by a year.  Most significantly, the stage manager’s role is to make the audience aware of their own relevance to the plays content; Dobson urges his audeince to ‘try and remember what is was like to be very young’.

Sullivan’s (lack of) setting creates a panoramic view of Grover’s Corner, encouraging a focus on humanity, relationship and routine and stripping theatre to its bare essentials, as Wilder himself claimed, the play ‘needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us’. In Savio(u)r’s production, this comprises of a few tables and chairs, the inventive use of ladders to create a Shakespearian balcony scene between the plays’ young lovers, Emily Webb (Zoë Swenson-Graham) and George Gibbs (Stewart Clegg) and the consistent and convincing use of mime.

Admittedly, the ‘five square feet of boarding’ is achieved at the Kings Head, making the need for fourteen actors seem at times cramped and unnecessary, however in the second act’s wedding scene, the theatre’s floor-level stage makes the audience not a observer of a play, but a guest at the character’s wedding. In the King’s Head you feel that you are not part of an audience, but a fly on the wall to the emotional moments of reality, and the stage manager, your tour guide.

This intimacy makes the final act of the play the most moving. Zoë Swenson-Graham brilliantly acts the return to earth after her death to painfully watch her twelfth birthday, powerless to interrupt her life and uncomfortably deciding to return to the grave in favour of a world where everyone fails to recognize they are living.

The play is tragic, painful and moving, but beneath its initial bite, it is hopeful and above all, life-affirming. It is these ingredients that Wilder felt were becoming abandoned by 1920s theatre, and precisely these qualities that are respectfully kept alive by Tim Sullivan.