Black Battles with Dogs

Synopsis

Three Europeans are isolated on the construction site of a western company in the heart of Africa, surrounded by barbed wire fences. High up on the watchtowers above, African security guards call out in the night to one another in throat songs to keep awake. As evening falls, a mysterious man, Alboury, penetrates the camp. When it emerges that he has come to demand the body of his brother who died that day in unknown circumstances, the ensuing action leads to a disturbing twist of events... Black Battles with Dogs takes place in a world where people are trapped and alone and where racism, fear and envy take hold of each character in turn.

Our Review:

16 April 2012

Bernard-Marie Koltes was a French playwright who died young. A quick trawl of the internet reveals that he is little known and seldom performed, yet this Southwark Playhouse revival of Black Battles with Dogs appears on the London Fringe at the same time as his later work, In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, currently showing at the Tristan Bates.

Set on a soulless French construction site somewhere in the middle of Africa, the play gives a snapshot into the lives of four contrasting characters as they attempt to aclimatize and come to terms with who, what and where they are.

A black site worker has recently died in circumstances that are never really revealed. Behind a blossoming tree, just beyond the barbed wire that separates the site and its white workers from the African village and its black inhabitants, a man claiming to be the deceased’s brother has come to try and claim the body. Chaotic events ensue as charact...

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