A BITE:07/

Dundee Rep Theatre co-production

in association with TRANSPORT

March - April 2007

by David Greig

Directed by Douglas Rintoul

Designed by Colin Richmond

Lighting Design by Ian Scott

Sound Design by Emma Laxton

Projection Mick McNicholas

Cast: Robert Paterson, Cameron Mowat,

Samantha Young, Joseph Kennedy,

Hannes Flaschberger, Michelle Bonnard,

Graeme Rooney and Chris Ryman.

TIME OUT ****(Critic's Choice)

METRO ****

THE SCOTSMAN ****

EVENING STANDARD ****

"In Brief Encounter, the events that unfold in the tea room at Milford Junction tell us all we need to know about the self-denying England of 1945. In Europe (1994), David Greig uses a station for similarly powerful metaphorical ends. In a small town - "the sort of place people come from, not the place they go to" - somewhere on the border between Eastern and Western Europe, characters hang around the soon-to-be-closed station, caught in limbo between the old world order and the new. Only the true adventurers, however, actually get on a train. While Greig nods obliquely to the fall of the Berlin Wall and war in the Balkans, the real force of this spare but strikingly poetic piece derives from its very non-specificity. Intriguingly, the playwright has said that another title for it could be "Scotland". It's about any Nowheresville in any country where all the good things happen elsewhere and all the bad things - the effects of oppressive centralisation, the resurgence of far-Right politics - trickle down eventually. Director Douglas Rintoul and designer Colin Richmond have put together a slick, sleek production in which benches, timetables and screens are slid around efficiently. The actors add to the unsettling sense of a world in transit by sitting at the sides of the stage when not required. There are some other Brecht-lite tricks, with projected captions providing titles for scenes. Yet the effect is the opposite of alienation. We are constantly engaged by particularly fine performances from Samantha Young as a febrile station assistant dreaming of faraway destinations, and Michelle Bonnard as a refugee fleeing undescribed atrocities. The two young women become friends and offer tentative hope that the ideal of the brave new Europe may also prove to be a workable reality."

THE TELEGRAPH

"The prefatory quotation accompanying David Greig's 1994 play Europe is from W H Auden's Refugee Blues ("But where shall we go to today, my dear?"), which is apt because the opening chorus of anonymous voices is pure Auden: "Ours is a small town on the border, at various times on this side, and, at various times, on the other, but always on the border." Hearing those lines in Douglas Rintoul's superlative revival at the Barbican Pit, a transfer from Dundee, you realise that this is probably the closest British theatre has got to acknowledging a debt to the poet in the centenary year of his birth. Auden's verse dramas remain his weakest suit, verging on unstageable, but, as with so many of the great poets of the '30s, his gift was to connect with the Continent as much as with our sense of being an island apart. That legacy, mislaid in the post-war period, is one Greig has picked up on and carries forward here. This decaying provincial town, where the local industry is kaput and the trains no longer stop, lies both in his native Scotland and in the dark heart of the European land-mass. Some of its inhabitants stubbornly cling to the idea of staying put, making do. Others allow themselves to dream of heading off down the tracks in search of a better life. That tension is brought out into the open, eventually spills into violence, with the arrival of two mysterious refugees, a middle-aged man and a young woman, who camp out in the defunct station. The topic of how Europe treats its migrants has hardly gone away, but Greig gets behind media issue-grinding and traces the hurt, longing and fear on all sides with intelligence, humour and a fair few expletives. Designer Colin Richmond musters beautiful background "departure board" visuals and scatters the mainly bare stage with autumn leaves. Without ever being explicit, the evening blows shaming memories of Bosnia's dead and discarded back in our faces."

THE FINANCIAL TIMES ****

"Playwright David Greig's enduring fascination is with identity: not the old truth/ illusion trope, but how we construct who we are, how we use external frameworks (interpersonal, financial, political) to validate our various modalities of thought. In his early days with the Suspect Culture company, he would deconstruct the drama itself; more recently, with pieces such as The Cosmonaut's Last Message... and The American Pilot, he has deftly interwoven the personal and the broader-world aspects. Europe, dating originally from 1994 and now revived in association with Dundee Rep, is of the latter kind. In a nameless small town near the shifting frontier between nameless countries, the railway station has become redundant: open borders mean no stopping for border controls, so the trains no longer stop. Stationmaster Fret tries to keep going through the bureaucratic motions, while his assistant Adele dreams of journeying to the trains' magical-sounding destinations. Their respective senses of self are catalysed by the arrival in the waiting room of two refugees (from what? from where?), just waiting without hope or expectation of a train or anything else. These incomers in turn become scapegoats for local resentment at the economic downturn, emblematised in the laying-off of Adele's husband Berlin. Europe: at various times it is the dreamed-of better life elsewhere, the exotic, the new opportunities for trade symbolised by international huckster Morocco; it is also who and where we are now, a symbol of civilisation and standards that we may look on as a birthright even while we betray them through, for instance, violent xenophobia. It is half-recognisable but never truly defined, like the blurred, distorted outlines of countries that flash up between scenes on the video backdrop. Greig, writing at the moment that Yugoslavia was fragmenting, grimly foretold so many characteristics and attitudes that are now commonplaces of 21st-century social and political life. This ought to be incidental to the play's central message that we must know not only ourselves but others; however, it cannot help lending an urgency, even a desperation to the work. Douglas Rintoul's elegantly spare production finds its heart in duologues between Robert Paterson and Hannes Flaschberger as Fret and the refugee father, and in particular between Samantha Young as the painfully romantic Adele and Michelle Bonnard as the disengaged, disillusioned Katia.

THE LIST ****

"Reviving a play that is old enough to merit revisiting but too young to be called a classic carries a certain risk. What seemed timely and topical a decade ago might now seem tired and trite. The remarkable thing about David Greig’s Europe, however, is that it speaks even more vividly about our world in 2007 than it did when it was first staged at the Traverse in 1994. Greig would argue that he wasn’t being prescient when he wrote about the movement of peoples on a continent riven by civil war and economic collapse, he was merely tuned in to a problem that hasn’t gone away. That doesn’t lessen the chill wind of recognition when we see Chris Ryman’s wheeler-dealing Morocco being viciously beaten up by a disenfranchised mob for consorting with Michelle Bonnard’s refugee Katia. It could be a racist attack in today’s UK - or anywhere else in today’s world in political flux. What strikes home most forcibly in Douglas Rintoul’s bold, sober, strongly acted production, played out on Colin Richmond’s suitably placeless set of advertising hoardings and neon lights, is the way Greig connects social disintegration with the loss of identity. All the characters in this town near the border of some unnamed country have been uprooted by forces beyond their control, but their greatest psychological wound is caused less by losing their livelihood than by having nowhere distinctive to call home. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher was right when she said there was no such thing as society - and this bleak place is what it looks like.