In the Penal Colony (Tour – Oxford)

A setting of Kafka’s bleak short story by the godfather of minimalism was never going to make for an easy night at the theatre, but MTW’s In the Penal Colony is utterly absorbing, harrowing no pun intended and at times disturbingly beautiful. Given the subject-matter (the torture and execution of a subaltern prisoner who knows nothing of his sentence, and the dilemma of a horrified Western visitor who finds his professed tolerance for other cultures tested by the barbaric injustice before him), I half-expected more of the explicit references to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib which have recently popped up in everything from Theodora to Idomeneo, but MTW’s production retains the non-specific setting of Kafka’s original and if anything is more powerful for doing so: the set simply consists of a bed and a ladder (the horrific ‘apparatus’ at the centre of the drama) and the clothing of the three nameless protagonists (Visitor, Officer and Condemned Man) gives no clue as to the location of the action.

Singing the role of the conflicted Visitor with immaculate diction and a distinctly Pears-esque timbre, Michael Bennett vividly conveys the character’s journey from detached moral relativism to impassioned outrage: the prologue and epilogue (in which a well-travelled, introspective intellectual reflects upon his failure to intervene in an unjust execution) recall the predicament of Captain Vere in Billy Budd, and his delivery of these passages made me long to hear him in Britten. As the sadistic Officer, Omar Ebrahim does a fine line in manic zeal: that his delivery occasionally lapsed into relentless barking was to a certain extent the nature of the beast, and his rapt description of the pre-death transcendence experienced by the victims shimmered with terrible beauty. The only other figure on stage (Rudolph Wurlitzer’s libretto dispenses with the soldier from Kafka’s short story) was, fittingly, often the most riveting: silent throughout, Gerald Tyler’s Condemned Man evokes fascination, revulsion and even moments of pitch-black humour in a remarkable performance which was further highlighted by the reactions of the small on-stage audience, who recoiled, averted their eyes and at times laughed awkwardly as the action unfolded at close quarters. (As the programme credits no extras – and I can’t imagine that MTW’s budget runs to a dozen supernumeraries – I assume that ‘real’ audience members were used here: in any event, the idea of various levels of ‘observers’ The Visitor, on-stage audience, and the audience in the auditorium was powerfully conceived and enhanced by the raising of the house-lights at climactic moments). The atmosphere of claustrophobic inevitability is intensified by Glass’s typically pared-down score (just string quartet plus double-bass and pre-recorded mechanical sound-effects): deliberately static in terms of harmony and rhythm, the dramatic climaxes stem primarily from relatively simple variations in tempo and dynamic, yet the result in the theatre is visceral and at times terrifying. Music Theatre Wales are fast developing a reputation for producing compelling contemporary music-drama and I look forward very much to their tour of Turnage’s Greek in the New Year.

– Katherine Cooper