The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other

Synopsis

Twenty five actors, 450 characters and no dialogue: A play without words. For a moment, a bright, empty town square. And then a figure darts across, and another, and another ­ business people, roller-bladers, a cowboy, several street-sweepers, a half-dressed bride, a film crew, a line of old men, a tourist, a beauty in a mirrored dress, Abraham and Isaac, a family of refugees, a fool ­ more and more people, the bizarre and the humdrum, fleetingly connected by proximity alone.

Our Review:

14 February 2008

Part of the package at the National Theatre these days is a sop to experimentalism, or the old European avant garde, and James Macdonald’s banal and unsexy production of a wordless Peter Handke street scenario – a piece seen at the Edinburgh Festival of 1994 in a stunningly beautiful production by Luc Bondy for the Berlin Schaubuhne – is a good example of this strand in the policy.

The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other came to Handke as he sat whiling away an afternoon in a pavement cafe in Trieste. “I got into a state of real observation,” he says (the Viennese writer is now 65 and living in Paris), “perhaps this was helped along a bit by the wine. Every little thing became significant, without being symbolic.”

Whereas Bondy’s production was a killer piece of precise, sensual choreography, a of mixture of Jacques Tati and Pina Bausch, set in an abstract white-walled desert flecked with telegraph poles, Macdonald and his designer [Hildegard Bechtler...

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Latest User Review

Gareth James - 11 April 2008:

Well come on.....it's original and inventive, it kept my attention for 100 mins, it made me laugh a lot, we had fun afterwards trying to work out some of the 'mythical' characters and it's a better representation of 'experimantal' theatre than the pretentious and dire attempts of Katie Mitchell at the same theatre! It's the sort of piece that should be seen in London and only the National could put it on. ...

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