Brighton Year-Round 2025

Nachtland

Janette Eddisford and ACT

Genre: Contemporary, Dark Comedy, Drama, European Theatre, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre, Translation, Youth Theatre

Venue: Main Studio, The Lantern Theatre

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play Nachtland translated by Patrick Marber premiered in English at the Young Vic last in February 2024. It now arrives for the first amateur or any revival, at the main Lantern theatre. Helmed by ACT’s co-artistic director Jannette Eddisford it runs till December 5. Performed by six of her Level 2 Students, like all such December offerings here it’s hugely ambitious, hurtling over 95 minutes.

Munich-born von Mayenburg (born 1972) is famed for several socially devastating plays, though Nachtland has brought him particular acclaim. A father’s died. Two siblings clear the attic. A wrapped watercolour painting of a Vienna church has been discovered, about 1912. It’s signed A Hitler. By the end two marriages might be over differently, and two eager evaluators have more than paper in the game. But do the family here have actual skin in the game, or is their skin mere Euro paper?

Nicola (Lilith Leonard) starts in a pre-emptory manner narrating the events; she’s the bossy dominant voice. It’s her and brother Philipp (Gabriel Oprea) eternal fence-sitter who haggle over getting dealers in to assess its worth and make enough money to buy proper houses. He’s a bit sensitive, or is he just embarrassed? His wife Judith (Sophie Delevine) is Jewish – as Nicola points out, pointedly. Judith is unequivocal. She’s for cutting off this hydra head of corruption. Philipp’s gift of an engagement to her ring years ago somehow ripples to the surface; along with a suitcase of ancient letters. Identities shift.

Whilst Leonard strikes a fine stridency and keeps to that, matching Oprea at his most outraged, Delevine, whose characters is most outraged, opts for a quieter register altogether. It makes hers one of two outstanding performances.  James Potttenden takes the unenviable role of Fabian, almost treated as an irrelevancy by wife Nicola, wibbling about value. Potttenden leans into Fabian’s irrelevance to his wife. Later though he takes on a remarkable physical performance of a man literally poisoned by items he’s trying to save, coming on demonstrably ill. He ends with one arm stuck in the air. But how?

The other exceptional performance is from Sarah Widdas as evaluator Evamarie. With her empathy for Hitler material she sashays from veiled to outright love of the culture she values. Widdas purrs Evamarie’s self-applause. It’s a deliciously shivering performance. Widdas later plays the tiny part of Luise, almost unrecognizable as an old woman.

Despite her admiration for A. Hitler, Evamarie introduces absolute proof. Not through the painting but its black frame, by one Samuel Morgenstern. Not poet Christian Morgenstern (a major German absurdist) they ask? No. A Jewish dealer authenticates Hitler. Through such switchback paradoxes von Mayenburg builds coal-black comedy.

Kahl (Elizabeth Thaarup, all poised cynic) chimes with Evamaria, is prepared to pay for an anonymous buyer. As civilised skeins flake off with accelerating barbs, Judith finds herself isolated. By Nicola about Palestine in a pincer-grab of anti-Semitism (this was pre-October 7); and in Kahl’s double assault.

In the first Kahl spins off references some of us might get, key for a German audience. They need bringing out if you see this. Kahl posits nearly everyone in German culture as an anti-Semite. That includes Goethe (“well we don’t burn them”) if not Jewish Heine. There’s Exile Thomas Mann; semi-Nazi Hans Pfitzner’s great opera Palestrina, the great poet Gottfried Benn (just complicit), the dramatist Hauptmann “still performed up and down.” She refers admiringly to conductors: “After the titans Furtwangler and Karajan, there’s only Thielemann.” The first two were complicit though not anti-Semites. But with Christian Thielemann born 1959 the BBC Music Magazine carried this comment by him in 2002: “After Barenboim’s left Berlin there’ll be less Jewing about round here.” He denied it and Barenboim said “I have to believe him.” I still won’t buy a Thielemann recording. But that’s why Kahl references him.

Von Mayenburg litanises the whole of German culture, turns it on its head, twice. He seriously asks, who is not complicit? And so we burn everything? And he asks through the mouth of a woman who admires Jewish flesh.

Kahl’s second approach is more personal to Judith herself. Propositions and counter-propositions as Judith plays back hard on racist tropes is thrillingly dark.

A fantastical red-lid moment of growing consummation between brother and sister with a reclaimed ring glares straight out of the union of Sigmund and Sieglinde in Wagner’s The Valkyrie: though the music here seems from Parsifal. No matter, the point is gloriously made. It’s sublimely twisted. The end is fiendish with the disappearance of one person and the arrival of another. The metaphysical, literal denouement of a shower raises metaphors lightly held in a twist right at the end.

Germany – unlike Austria – almost aggressively flays itself for its past, but rightly won’t rest. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Winter Solstice carries the same outrage (it played at the Orange Tree in January 2017 and on Radio 3 in 2019 and 2021). On. A personal note, reading my poems about Czech composers in Theresienstadt to a Bavarian audience and their German versions by translator Gerald Fiebig was certainly a memorable experience. I had hesitated briefly. “No they’re guilty – they damn well need them rammed down their mouths” spat Gerald. And the newspapers liked it. Anyone who might think this play isn’t symptomatic of Germany, and the way it comes to terms with the Holocaust, need only a day or two absorbing German culture. And they’ll bump into its far-right opposites. That’s the living sinew this play lays bare.

Strong lighting design from Ewwan MacQuire-Plos, operated by Ollie Wislon. And Eddisford has designed a modernish slightly 70s-seeming set with easel, ladder and the outline of a lounge  Eddisford’s sound design plays on what sounds like post-Kraftwerk German funk, like the original production.

Delevine and Widdas command the stage with nuance, chemistry and truth. These are stylish performances and extremely fine. Tharrup slinks her dark with delicious effect at times, and Pottenden might be underrated because of his wibbly role; but it’s exactly right. Oprea is best when havering, but the chemistry with the potent-voiced Leonard makes for interesting results, though modulation in a small space is their next level. Eddisford has scored with this outrageously provocative, troubling satire that flays the German soul and hangs up the skins, stretched.

Production Photography Peter Williams. Sound and Light Operator Ollie Wilson.

Published December 5, 2025December 5, 2025 by Simon Jenner