Stranger's House
This is London
Nick Curtis
December 5, 1997
German writer Dea Loher's play, the third and last in the Royal Court's New European Writing Season, was worth waiting for. Where Christophe Pellet's One More Wasted Year (France) was sleek but empty, and David Planell's Bazaar (Spain) was earnest and muddled, Stranger's House is a substantial, skilful and serious piece of writing. Set among a group of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who fled at various times to Germany, it is a play about values - moral, monetary and cultural - and is given a grimly atmospheric production by Mary Peate.
Yanne, a young Macedonian fleeing military service, turns up seeking sanctuary at the tobacconist's shop run by his father's bosom friend Hristo in an un-named, godforsaken German town. Hristo is revered as a hero back home, having supposedly escaped from Yugoslavia when the high ideals of the Tito revolution turned sour. If Yanne hopes for a warm welcome and sympathy over his own desertion, he's soon disillusioned. Hristo is a bitter, chain-smoking husk: his crushed wife Terese is a small-time prostitute; his daughter, Agnes, is married to the brusque mechanic Jorg, who crippled her in a car crash. Secrets burn beneath the surface of every relationship, and Yanne's decision to flee the coming war in his homeland is treated with the deepest suspicion.
Mary Peate's production, decked out with rusty metal chairs by Simon Vincenzi and lit with stark precision by Chahine Yavroyan, is suffused with an atmosphere of poverty and the German ambivalence towards immigrants.
The scenes pass swiftly, briefly illuminating moments of betrayal and cowardice, or highlighting the common confusion about the fragmented factions of the former Yugoslavia. This is a bleak and uncompromising work that uses the situation in Bosnia - and uses it sensitively - for an examination of loyalty to one's family, one's country and ultimately to oneself.
Yanne is more a catalyst than a character, but Matthew Rhys gives him a dignity that shades into arrogance. Georgina Sowerby is quietly moving as Agnes, Paul Bettany is suitably menacing as the bullying coward Jorg, and Christopher Ettridge immerses himself convincingly in the sour fug that makes up Hristo's murky character. Individually, none of the performances is remarkable, but together they contribute hugely to the looming mood of Loher's play. It may have taken the Court's NEWS season a while to find it, but Stranger's House proves that exciting work from young authors is certainly out there on the continent, somewhere.
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