On the platform of a provincial railway station, in a border town somewhere in Europe, two refugees arrive: Sava and his daughter, Katia. They’ve been travelling forever. All they want to do is rest and find a place to begin again. But it won’t be here. Read more …
Because the town is dying. The station itself is about to shut: trains from Vienna, Warsaw and Budapest hurtle along the tracks, but none will stop. Both stationmaster Fret and Adele, the porter, yearn to leave. But they, like the refugees, must just watch the trains flash by.
The town’s lightbulb factory has closed. Switched off. Young locals, like Horse, Billy and Berlin, are unemployed. Their days are spent in bars, complaining, sharing angry fantasies, or prowling the streets, increasingly resentful of the refugees in their midst.
Meanwhile, the shadowy Morocco, an ‘entrepreneur’, makes a living slipping across the invisible border, buying and selling...anything. That’s where the profit is now.
Tensions rise, threaten to explode.
And at night, out in the forest, the wolves gather...
So who will live and who will die? Who will find love when it is least expected? And who will manage to escape...?
This startlingly contemporary work by Scotland’s greatest living playwright is a fierce and compassionate drama about shifting borders, changing identities and globalisation.
It takes some doing, though, to make a play so packed with contemporary relevance and urgent drama seem both dreary and uninteresting; and yet that’s what the Pitlochry company come close to achieving, in what’s perhaps the least successful production of this summer season.
Europe is a thoughtful play of ideas by a young playwright. It is serious, humane and challengingly slow burning. Unfortunately, director John Durnin never quite finds the spark needed to bring it to life.
While uneven, the production is a timely revival of the fact that, in style and concerns, this is a playwright who arrived almost fully formed.
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry from Thursday August 24, 2017, until Friday October 13, 2017. More info: www.pitlochry.org.uk
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