Over There

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?