Andrew Fuhrmann

Berlin, by Joanna Murray-Smith, is an intense, very wordy, imperfectly plotted, but nonetheless stylish play. ‘Stylish’ is a strange word to describe a play about young love sabotaged by tragic secrets and the legacy of the Holocaust. Shouldn’t it also be ‘heart-breaking’, ‘harrowing’, or at least ‘poignant’? Perhaps, but ‘stylish’ is the right word for a play – a thriller, in fact – that is also a swiftly argued essay on the difficulties faced by sensitive and ethical individuals who want to free themselves from the snares of history to make a new future.

Here, as in earlier works, Murray-Smith frets her text with the glitter of a cool cosmopolitanism. The dialogue swerves – credibly enough – from the politics of contemporary art to an eloquent commentary on public monuments, from the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the repatriation of colonial-era artefacts. It’s the sort of play where retro chic punk music sits comfortably next to a spine-tingling string quartet. And there are plenty of witty snapshot observations – mostly sardonic in tone – of life in contemporary Berlin, with its tourists and artists and hipsters and migrants.

Tom is a twenty-something backpacker who has just arrived in Berlin. He meets a local woman called Charlotte in a bar under a train station. He gives her a line about needing somewhere to stay, and she invites him back to her place. It’s past midnight by the time they reach the swanky inner-city loft space in Prenzlauer Berg, where Charlotte lives by herself. They talk and drink and talk some more. Soon, their flirtation becomes an involved discussion about blame, forgiveness, and the difference between guilt and responsibility. This debate seems to get them both pretty excited, and they agree that this might be the real thing.

There might be a hitch, however: it eventually emerges that Tom is Jewish. In fact, his great-grandfather lived on Drakestrasse in Berlin in a large house full of antiquities and paintings by the likes of Picasso and Chagall. He was, of course, murdered by the Nazis. Suddenly, the presence in Charlotte’s apartment of a large painting of a stormy sky by John Constable – a huge canvas that dominates the set – begins to make more sense. At the same time, some of Tom’s banter can seem rather sinister. Charlotte, however, is too swept up in the moment to notice. She recites a poem by Rilke, and they go to bed.

Charlotte, played with much subtlety and craft by Grace Cummings, is a poet, a waitress, and a trust-fund baby. She feels out of place in modern Germany: she abhors the extreme right but nonetheless has a strong patriotic streak, which puts her at odds with her contemporaries on the left. She insists that she understands the enormity of the Nazi atrocities – and admits that they need to be remembered – but she also feels that her country has languished too long in a hole of moral responsibility. Anxiety about the crimes of the past, she believes, is distorting the way in which Germans see the problems of the present.

The next morning, while making juice and coffee, Charlotte expatiates on this desire for her compatriots to let go of their guilt and belong more fully to the now. Challenged by Tom, who can scarcely believe his ears, she begins criticising what she thinks of as Jewish victimhood. This is where Cummings is particularly good, managing to seem both astonished at the crassness of her own words but also defiant and unwilling to back down. It’s some sort of achievement that she remains a sympathetic character throughout the play.

Tom, on the other hand, played by Michael Wahr, is less sympathetic, despite his more orthodox politics. Early on, he proposes a theory, claiming that we are all unconsciously driven to fix the mistakes and more serious calamities of our past. Charlotte’s brother was killed in a car accident. Now, says Tom, she is compelled to save young men. That’s why she so readily invited him, a complete stranger, into her home. For Tom, however, the compulsion is restitution: he wants to repair the breakup of his great-grandfather’s home by retrieving the stolen art. Why he resorts to burglary rather than going through the official channels is not explained.

The snares of history

Joanna Murray-Smith’s new play

Andrew Fuhrmann

It’s the sort of play where retro chic punk music sits comfortably next to a spine-tingling string quartet

Director Iain Sinclair has played down the physicality of Tom and Charlotte’s mutual attraction, giving their flirtation a graceful but almost funereal tone. This sombre mood is exaggerated by the heavy, tomb-like quality of Christina Smith’s set and Niklas Pajanti’s shadowy lighting. In the memorable scene when Tom gets out of bed to check his phone, he is caught in a shaft of greenish-blue light from the side of the stage. At that moment he looks like a corpse rising from the earth, clambering back into the present.

For all its pared-back stylishness, however, Berlin is a strange play. The story of a law school drop-out turned international art thief and a waitress with a $5 million painting hanging over her bed is a flimsy one. Why wasn’t more care taken with this potentially gripping plot? There are scenes – such as the almost farcical denouement – when the lack of plausibility feels like a wilful act of authorial disavowal.

It is possible to imagine this play as a longer and more considered statement, with more detail and dramatic nuance. This production, which is only eighty minutes long, feels rushed. There also need to be more moments for reflection, moments when the quipping and the debating stop.

The audience should be given a chance to think for themselves, for Joanna Murray-Smith’s theme is one with considerable purchase on contemporary debates about memory and history in Australia and other countries around the world. g

Berlin (Melbourne Theatre Company) was presented in April–May 2021. This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre. He was an ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow in 2013 and is currently writing a book on the plays of Patrick White.