ajhlovestheatre

THE PASSENGER

by Nadya Menuhin

based on the novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

directed by Tim Supple

Finborough Theatre, London – until 15 March 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-passenger/

Written in 1938 but lost for eighty years, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel Der Reisende (The Passenger) speaks to our time with a horrible relevance. Set around the events of Kristallnacht, when Nazi supporters terrorised Jews and destroyed or seized their property across German cities, and centred on Otto Silbermann, a wealthy businessman on the run thanks to a religion which causes him to lose everything, despite being married to a gentile, over a couple of tense, terrifying days. It now comes to the theatre in a fluid, accomplished treatment by Nadya Menuhin, given a gut punch of a staging by former Young Vic AD Tim Supple…and there are few more powerful productions currently playing in London.

Part of the reason for this is that Menuhin’s script never feels like an adaptation, possessing a vivid theatricality and mordant, slightly surreal wit. It has a cinematic sweep combined with laser sharp focus, and an urgent, inexorable pace. Director Supple masterfully pitches the play somewhere between a thriller and a waking nightmare, with a technically complex staging (Joseph Alford’s sound and Mattis Larsen’s lighting contribute invaluably to the atmosphere of shuddering foreboding) that never loosens its grip across ninety disturbing but exciting minutes. 

Multi-roling actors lurk and appear out of the gloom surrounding Hannah Schmidt’s tiled square set (the audience surrounds the action) to accuse, abuse, engage and just occasionally to comfort Robert Neumark Jones’s Otto, like figures in a dream, the soundtrack thrums along rhythmic and unsettling, and individual moments startle and shock. Mime, shadow then total darkness are used to compelling effect and any hint of style over substance is quelled by the truth and precision of the performances (the five strong cast never hit a single false note) and the horrendous relevance of the story’s themes. This is compelling, richly inventive theatre-making of the highest order, and the sense of creatives and cast all sharing the same vision for the production is exhilaratingly palpable.

Where The Passenger proves so especially troubling, and so timely, is in its depiction of ordinary people getting on with their lives against a background of mounting evil. A simple game of chess becomes almost unbearably tense when one of the participants is wearing a swastika armband while the other is a Jew, albeit one who hasn’t disclosed his religion. The temperature in the room dips when Otto blithely opines that the unrest won’t amount to much and will be over soon, the eroticism of an encounter on a train with an aloof, beautiful fellow passenger (Kelly Price, sublime)  is undercut with distress as the realisation dawns on her of how much trouble the Jews are actually in.

Neumark Jones brilliantly conveys Otto’s journey from self-assured urbanity to blind panic and incomprehension at the way his world is imploding and at what head-spinning speed. The other four actors manage to make it feel as though there’s a cast of dozens, and every one of them shines. Ben Fox is chilling as the worm-turning subordinate emboldened to castigate Otto by the anti-Semitic regime on the rise, Dan Milne breaks the heart as a decent man horribly attacked by Nazi goons, and Eric MacLennan draws a striking contrast between a pompously competitive chess player and an asylum inmate at the edges of his sanity. Price, the sole woman, deploys outstanding physical and vocal technique plus terrific stage presence as she morphs thrillingly between kindly no-nonsense nurse, a slatternly, deranged anti-Semite, then Otto’s sensible, appalled wife, and finally the elusive, intriguing beauty that comes closest to helping our beleaguered hero.

The ending hurts and haunts: the rhythm and cadences of Supple’s production reach boiling point in a stark, loud, distressing sequence where Otto is incarcerated with other humans deemed undesirable by the ruling regime, before finding release, through impenetrable darkness, in the noise of trains whooshing endlessly along tracks. Any sense of comfort is fleeting though, punctured by the thought that this sound – an aural motif throughout the evening – may well be that of the transport that conveyed countless innocent souls to Auschwitz, Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka and so on: it’s cruel, clever….and the stuff of great theatre.

The Passenger is essential viewing.