Danton's Death

Synopsis

The play is set during the climax of the French Revolution. After a series of bloody purges the life-loving, volatile Danton is tormented by his part in the killing. His political rival, the driven, ascetic Robespierre, decides Danton’s fate. A titanic struggle begins. Once friends who wanted to change the world, now one stands for compromise, the other for ideological purity as the guillotine awaits.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 23 July 2010

The National Theatre keeps returning to Georg Büchner’s thrilling 1835 drama of the French Revolution – Michael Grandage's NT debut production is the third after Jonathan Miller’s (in 1971) and Peter Gill’s (in 1982) – without ever quite nailing the hectic mix of rhetoric and Expressionism.

Büchner, who wrote the play aged 21 in just five weeks, captures the squall and confusion of the First Terror in the turmoil of street violence, courtroom denunciations and the arraignment of Danton and his friends who are pleading for an end to the executions now running at two dozen a day.

The vivacity of all this is suggested by the fact that Danton, played with great vim and swagger by Toby Stephens, is the victim of the tribunal he founded a few months earlier. Stephens cuts a more romantic figure than did Brian Cox in the last production, though Cox was sweatier, and he embodies the contradictory, impulsive side of Danton to perfect...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 1 September 2010:

I love history plays and have been well served on the South Bank in the last couple of years. Howard Brenton has been responsible for some of the best of those plays but his adaptation of Buchner's Danton's Death is a severe disappointment. It never engages as a drama and mainly consists of a series of speeches, frequently shouted at the audience, particularly by Toby Stephens. The final coup de theatre is clever in a "how did they do that" way but frankly I got more of a flavour of the French Revolution from the short-lived musical of a Tale of Two Cities than from this....

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