Tales from the Vienna Woods

Richard Jones's new production of the play, in a free translation by David Harrower, is the latest in Nicholas Hytner's very successful £10 ticket season at the National Theatre.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

JULIE MYERSON:
I thought it was immensely powerful and sinister. I also thought it was very enjoyable. I thought that the first half was too long. But I thought it was that thing that the National Theatre does really well, which is to give you a nice, big cast, working so co-operatively, working ensemble acting, you know it's going to be good, you can just sit back and relax and let them do their thing. I loved the sets, I was transported back.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
One of the problems of the play is that we know the ending, the author didn't. Does it feel dated now?

TOM PAULIN:
We also know what led up to the ending. That is what mattered to me. It was an important piece of theatre. This was a deeply, deeply enduringly sinister country that produced Hytner, all sorts of Nazis, working to take power at the time. A very brave writer, a consistent opponent of the Nazis, but no sense of the vast and the terrible forces at work in that society. Not enough kitsch at all. One little young Nazi storm trooper who is mocked a bit, but there he is. Not catching anything like the deeply sinister nature of that very, very sinister culture.

ALKARIM JIVAN:
The production is a series of flats, which are like the backdrops of postcards, they looked like blank tablecloths. This is very much a play set in a specific time and place. The set did not help evoke the time and place and atmosphere. I think that the problem was that it was a very cold-hearted production.

JULIE MYERSON:
I thought there was a sense of the people, they were sliding into a chaos. They didn't understand it. It was a very decadent play.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
I thought that the strange thing was that they were caricatures, if you have that you can't have this sense of a mismatch.

TOM PAULIN:
If you think of the decadence of Naziism, it wasn't there at all.

ALKARIM JIVAN:
It was played comically.

TOM PAULIN:
It was just editing out evil all the time, historical evil.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
Julie, you were a good test- case, do you think this is a good production for the £10 series?

JULIE MYERSON:
Yes, I thought it was great. I watched this as a comedy that kept knocking me, so I was not expecting the same things, but I think it's a great way of seeing that play.