Berlin

An Australian backpacker and a confident bar-hand at a “very Berlin bar” return to her studio-loft for a one-night stand – but first they drink and talk, and for a long time.

These would-be lovers are oddly tentative, happy to question each other, jostling with teasing flirtations, jokey scenarios and bits of personal story.  We sense these engaging non-sequiturs and occasional serious subjects will return later in Joanna Murray-Smith’s play, especially when they touch on the Jews once dragged from this building by Nazis and the memories and nature now of young Berliners.   

When are the Germans – and the Jews – able or allowed to forget, to let their guilt and grief fade into the sunlight of a future?

Moving somehow naturally from Holocaust to bedroom, by the next morning Tom (Harry Reid) and Charlotte (Olivia Xegas) are fond lovers.  But Tom is pacing, even more frenzied, urging her to run away together, determined to cancel his past and restart his life from now.  Then in the last quarter, typical of Murray-Smith, the thrilling reveal comes.  Their own histories explain everything, their fighting is furious but articulate, and the ending appropriate.

Their stories speak to mad arguments today about moral relativism, about numbers of civilians slaughtered in Gaza and Lebanon vis-a-vis those massacred in Israel, and whether the Holocaust trumps any other war crime.

Reid brings a relaxed Aussie truth to the heavy challenge of playing an unreadable Tom and Xegas is convincing and spirited as the well-born, curious Charlotte, despite an unplaceable accent partly eroding her all-important Berlin character.  They both move easily around Megan Venhoek’s effective if modest loft set, and with director Peta Downes should soon find stronger dramatic beats and, advisedly, speed the play’s overlong foreplay.

Berlin was premiered by the MTC in 2021 and later revived in Melbourne; it’s good to see the play’s first outing in Sydney.

Martin Portus

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Photographer: Rob Studdert for DI Studio