Over There

As 24 year-old identical twins, Harry and Luke Treadaway are not all that hard to tell apart, and they are well cast as different aspects of Berlin on either side of the wall in Mark Ravenhill’s lively new piece in the Court’s season of new plays about Germany.

It’s not really a play, more a sort of philosophical installation with Harry representing the materialistic West and Luke the demoralised, still downtrodden East. Ravenhill’s political diagnosis may be simple, even simple-minded, but he’s created a strong visual metaphor of difference and dependability.

Harry is Franz and Luke is Karl. They inhabit the same sky blue box as Johannes Schutz designed for The Stone earlier this season, with the addition of piles of beer boxes and supplies of chocolate sauce, mayonnaise and tomato ketchup. The last three items come in handy for smearing all over each other in a gesture of occupation.

Play acting’s involved. At first and last, Luke’s in pink drag as a Polish street-walker in California, Harry a prospective client. The invitation to screw things up while screwing the foreigners is one not lightly declined. Even when both boys strip down to underpants (which they do a lot) and wear identical silver suits, Franz always looks the hipper, the handsomer, the guy in charge, the cool cat that got the cream.

The switch of locations is all in the mind, but there’s no ease of transition. The mother who escaped across the border with Franz has died of cancer. Karl is in the “home of democracy” with his father and a fat girlfriend. They both watch porn with their hands down their pants. Their psychic relationship has survived the separation but not the uneven balance of wealth. The show becomes a statement of attitudes not political insights.

The two actors are tremendous and have written a really good song that Harry sings with an acoustic guitar. The author has directed a fairly slight piece with Ramin Gray, and it should go down a treat in the co-producing Schaubuhne in Berlin, Ravenhill’s second home, after the Court run. But it has a faint sense of being written to order, of fitting a bill without hitting a bullseye or defining what life might really be like in the undivided city. Why not enter it for the Turner Prize?

- Michael Coveney