Berlin

A Tuesday night, after Uni, after Hours. Making your way to a mid-week show at the coveted south-bank theatre. Like most MTC shows, you run through the rain and push past the fossilising relics who are the regular audience on a Tuesday Night. Skipping inside the theatre doors just as the bell stops ringing to start the show. The lights come up and so begins the next starring performance by Grace Cummings in a German accent!

‘Berlin’ has to be one of the most intellectually engaging performances I have seen in the last three years. Whilst it is thankfully not attempting to be a Brecht or a Beckett, Joanna Murray-Smith simply places an incredibly important moral argument on a simple stage between two flirtatious youngsters.

Do the young German population still have to be held in the chokehold of their great great grandparents’ terrible crimes? Do young Jewish youths merely build their identity through the pain of their great great grandparents? The answer to these questions is not important. What was mesmerising was the way Grace Cummings and Michael Wahr work through these late-night chats in both volume and space. 

This show is not a slow burning deep and meaningful. It is 80 non-stop minutes of electricity, youthfulness, passion, sex, morality, philosophy and the memory of generations which is said to build peoples identify. Unfortunately, giving more of the content away than that may ruin the power of this piece.

Whilst the show only discusses incredibly specific contexts for building identify, it is amazing to watch people engage so very passionately about their history and what it means for them. As a bonus, we are back in the theatre.