Mr Kolpert ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Darren Boyd as Bastian, Adam Godley as Ralf, Amanda Drew as Sarah, Melanie Ramsay as Edith

Production photography by John Haynes

Translated by David Tushingham

Direction: Richard Wilson Design: Julian McGowan Lighting: Johanna Town Sound: Paul Arditti Movement: Jane Mason Music: Olly Fox

Cast: Darren Boyd, Callum Dixon, Amanda Drew, Adam Godley, Melanie Ramsay

“The young German dramatist David Gieselmann gives Mr Kolpert a crazy, blood-drenched twist to a situation teasingly explored in the classic play and movie Rope … Mr Kolperrt also opens with a couple, a trunk and an impending dinner party. But here bored Ralf and Sarah decide to amuse themselves by pretending to their friends that the trunk contains the dead body of one of their work colleagues. Is this sick-joke dis-simulation a double bluff? …

“ Adam Godley and the alarmingly seductive Amanda Drew give the right degree of conspiratorial creepiness to the hosts who draw the titilated Edith into their sinister web. In Rope, the motive is the arrogance of the undergraduates, their belief that by killing they will become Neitzschean supermen. Here, in one of the couple’s slippery explanations, murder springs from their desire to feel human again in an age of numb conformity – a desire which eventually rebounds against them.”

Paul Taylor THE INDEPENDENT 10 May

“Comedy doesn’t come much blacker or better than this. David Gieselmann’s brilliant piece, translated by David Tushingham and opening the Royal Court’s International Playwrights season, not only satirises the appetite for violence that fuels a lot of modern film and theatre, but also, in a curious way, fulfills it…

“What I love about the evening is the way it is both traditional and postmodern: it plays on narrative suspense while deploying a wide range of cultural references. The trunk is straight out of Hitchcock’s Rope. Getting the guests is an idea borrowed from Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. And, as the action develops, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction casts its inevitable bloodstained shadow. But Gieselmann strikes me as much more than a knowing hipster. He is really a preturned moralist saying that in Germany, and elsewhere, there is an urban ennui and emotional deadness that drives people to ever greater extremes to discover lost feelings.”

Michael Billington THE GUARDIAN 11 May

“[Gieselmann’s] mastery of tone and pace, precisely brought out in Richard Wilson’s fine direction, is nightmarish in its effect on an audience … What Gieselmann creates is a rather Edenic world. Or rather, this is what Ralf, Sarah, and later Edith endeavour to recreate. Where the distinction between good and evil is denied, perhaps the raptures of liberty can be experienced. Or not. Perhaps freedom still won’t be found, no matter what one does to another person…

“Gieselmann’s play, in David Tushingham/s suave and witty translation, can probably bear some wider socio-political interpretartion, and certainly a socio-religious one – not by chance is Bastian an architect, whereas Ralf researches chaos. But the crux of this compulsively watchable play is to be found in its cloasing tableau, where three naked people stand apart, expressing feelings it would not be right to disclose here.”

Jeremy Kingston THE TIMES 11 May

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