When August Wilson died last year aged 60, the American theatre lost one of its most humane and individual talents. Nobody else could have written this tough, lyrical, unforgiving and hopeful play, set in 1904 Pittsburgh, a stopping point once used by Southern blacks escaping from slavery to Canada. Some buildings of this “underground railway” can still be seen in Pennsylvania. The play is both epic and symbolic, a thriller and a parable. Aunt Esther Tyler’s house is a purgatorial place where people can rest, but also get to know themselves and purge their souls. This may sound pretentious, but it isn’t. For some of the characters, it’s a matter of life and death, since one result of so-called freedom is that you may have to run from a sadistic black policeman who has no scruples about killing his own. Paulette Randall’s production moves with masterly assurance from realism to hard but dreamlike symbolism and back again. These characters are truly on a journey, real or symbolic, dangerous and purifying, towards some beautiful city. (Many black Americans still haven’t got there.) Carmen Munroe and Joseph Marcell lead a cast of seven in some of the best company acting I’ve seen at this theatre. Four stars
Stallerhof
Southwark Playhouse
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Stallerhof might be translated as The House of the Stallers. In fact, it’s a not too prosperous Bavarian farm. It is also a prison, in which the Stallers’ teenage daughter, Beppi (Matti Houghton), short-sighted and backward, is the prisoner. The parents (Michael Gunn, Alwyne Taylor) are sober and pious, for which read hard and bigoted. They can’t forgive Beppi for being what she is, and Beppi can’t communicate what it’s like. The family share a silence that comes from both too much understanding and too little. Franz Xaver Kroetz (b1946) is the last of the German expressionists. He’s a poet of the brutalities in the lives of simple, hard people: not hard of heart, but hardened in their skin and bones, their moral values, such as they were, bludgeoned out of them by hardship and neglect. Nurture, the world they live in, has corrupted the nature they were born with. When Beppi gets pregnant by Sepp, the farm hand (Roger Ringrose), Staller wants revenge: not justice for his daughter, but to clear his name. Beppi is used to her life — for her, any kindness is simply a break from misery — and Houghton, in only her second stage role, gives a performance of extraordinary purity, simplicity and inarticulate pain. Maria Aberg’s direction is exemplary in its fierce, calm objectivity. Four stars