Nachtland at the Young Vic – Reviews Round-up

"A provocative plunge into art history"

"The discovery of what could be a painting by Hitler leads to a moral quagmire in Patrick Marber’s punchy staging of Marius von Mayenburg’s play"

"When the play begins, the stage is clear – except for a watercolour stashed in the attic. It’s a tame sepia view of a church with a signature that looks awfully like “A. Hitler”. “The Hitler?” gasps Nicola’s husband. Well, yes. In Marius von Mayenburg’s snappy 2022 play, set in Berlin, the wrangling sibs (Dorothea Myer-Bennett and John Heffernan, both terrifically narky) and their spouses are flummoxed. They enlist an expert (a crisp Jane Horrocks in arthouse specs) whose grandpapa was Hitler’s curator."

"Patrick Marber’s punchy staging often places people in square formation, swivelling to snarl in all directions."

"In Maja Zade’s spicy translation and with an excellent cast, it is all, as the buyer says, “pretty strong pepper”. Von Mayenburg doesn’t go deep, but prods modern Germany’s sore spots with provoking vigour."

"This black comedy about Hitler’s art is the hit the Young Vic needs"

"Jane Horrocks hits the deadpan target as a fashion-victim art-expert in this Mel Brooks spin on Antiques Roadshow"

"Munich-born playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s canny, if not fully achieved dark comedy"

"... we’re hardly exempt from the frisson of culpability in what at times feels like a Mel Brooks spin on Antiques Roadshow (there’s even a Hitler salute brought on by a Tetanus infection). It’s not just that the script (translated by Maja Zade) utilises direct address, as the actors pace a patchily floored stage-area before the crumbling façade of a house. A lot of the laughs, too, are guilty pleasures."

"Alas, von Mayenburg arrives, via incest, at overkill, as if angling for trigger-warnings über alles. Even so, the brisk evening holds our queasy, amused attention and offers a haunting reminder that Hitler once saw beauty in the world, and tried to capture it, however ineptly, before madly deciding to lay it waste."

"A dark, unsettling drama about finding Hitler’s art in the attic"

"Jane Horrocks plays an art expert in this unsettling, endlessly fascinating drama about a pair of siblings who, upon discovering a shocking heirloom in the loft, must grapple with their family’s complicated history"

"You’re never quite on solid ground with Marius von Mayenburg’s destabilising, endlessly fascinating new play."

"Their resulting moral dilemma could easily produce a worthy debate play, but this Patrick Marber-directed concoction is packed full of lurid surprises, sharp tonal shifts and David Bowie dance breaks. It’s not quite as much fun as that makes it sound, but it’s still pretty great. The uniformly strong cast nail the heightened tone here, declaring their inner turmoil straight out to the audience as they excavate Germany’s barely hidden Nazi past."

"Marber’s staging is fleet-footed and slick, creating abrupt transitions between semi-naturalism and mesmerising strangeness. Still, it sometimes feels a bit too quick to mop up and move on after Nachtland’s darkest moments, instead of letting their impact linger."

"It’s a typically unsettling conclusion to a play that’s hard to classify – but easy to watch, bewildered and enraptured all at once."

"A superb cast grapples with this challenging German satire about a pair of siblings who inherit a very unusual painting"

"As a wilfully uncomfortable play about contemporary Germany it certainly works. That’s not to say Mayenburg doesn’t have some smartly universal stuff to say about the constructedness of identity and the means by which racial prejudices take root. But it would be absurd to pretend this was anything other than a nationally specific story – and it’s okay to stage stories about other cultures!"

"Patrick Marber’s production is atmospheric, drenched in the music of Berlin-era Bowie, with an evocative haunted house set from Anna Fleischle that looks like a rotting corpse. There are excellent performances"

"Still, there’s something a bit draining about its abrupt shifts in tone, and its caginess about being out and out funny. It’s a fiddly play, that frequently threatens you with a good time but it often feels like the cast and Marber are more interested in being funny than the text is."

"a Hitler painting causes a family rift in Patrick Marber’s latest production"

"Anna Fleischle’s design ingeniously suggests the lumber of old inheritance and allegiance"

"Marber’s production smartly swerves between naturalism and surreal derangement – raising the question of whether the two modes are actually distinct."

"Harshness is fringed with skittishness – a tetanus-ridden arm rises, John Cleese-style, into a Nazi salute – and with some grim sibling-sex frolics. Bowie is played; Augen sings. Yet the action is deliberate; no character truly disrupts expectations. Von Mayenburg makes saying the unsayable look too easy."

"Nachtland is a queasy black comedy that asks urgent questions"

"German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s disturbing satire comes to the Young Vic, London"

"The play’s setting might be German, but its questions about history, legacy, thinly buried prejudice and resurgent antisemitism ring out more generally."

"Despite the seriousness of the subject, Nachtland (translated by Maja Zade) is deliberately stylised and often tartly funny."

"Some arguments feel engineered in, and Marber doesn’t get all the jump-cuts to work. But he and his excellent cast are very good at delivering the unnerving black comedy and fostering a queasy uncertainty about where we are heading next."

"Heightened, tongue-in-cheek tone"

"Provocative dark comedy about how fascism flourishes, in a vigorous staging by Patrick Marber"

"Posing disquieting questions about the legacies of fascism, this provocative dark comedy, written by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg and translated by Maja Zade, struggles to articulate its thoughtful arguments incisively."

"Patrick Marber directs with a heightened, tongue-in-cheek tone."

"Jane Horrocks provides much of the comic relief as Evamaria, the frosty art expert called in to authenticate the painting... John Heffernan is amusingly dislikeable as condescending, passive-aggressive brother Philipp, locked in a toxic love-hate power struggle with his equally awful sister Nicola, who is played with snarling self-regard by Dorothea Myer-Bennett."

"A thorny, intractable issue, clumsily addressed. What a disappointment"

"Marius von Mayenburg’s play about greed and anti-semitism is unsubtle and unresolved"

"What should we do with artworks created by monsters? That’s the central question of this laboriously discursive play by Marius von Mayenburg, about siblings who inherit what appears to be an early painting by Hitler. It’s also part of a wider movement among German authors to foreground the Führer in discussions of the nation’s guilt over the Holocaust."

"It's a thorny, intractable issue, clumsily addressed. Most of von Mayenburg’s characters have little interior life and instead parrot polar viewpoints, while Philip embodies pure weakness. No one attempts a German accent but the dialogue sounds stiff and alien (the English translation is by Maja Zade)."

"There’s a random hint of incest, an unexplained disappearance, mad moments when characters deliberately overact or bark like dogs. After 100 minutes the play fizzles out, unresolved. A disappointment."

"You’ll have a lively journey home from this Nazi satire"

"You may well have a lively journey home discussing it all. For all the excellence of the cast, though, and for all the stripped-back poise of Patrick Marber’s production and Anna Fleischle’s thrust-stage design, I could never surrender to it as a piece of storytelling. Right from the sour start, the fractious siblings are mere mouthpieces for opposing views."

"There is a smart moment of magic realism near the end, where myth dances with satire. Otherwise, elegantly done as it is, Nachtland is too comfy with its contrivances. And it got very few laughs on my visit."