There is a cinematic, expressionist quality to Nadya Menuhin’s play The Passenger, adapted from Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel Der Reisende. Much of the performance takes place in semi-darkness, with sinister figures in long 1930s coats at times standing menacingly near the corners of the four-sided performance space, at other times walking slowly along its perimeter. The heavy, pulsating soundscape of Joseph Alford occasionally adds to the tense atmosphere.
Set in Germany during the Nazi regime of the 1930s following the government-organised Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish people, the play follows the increasingly desperate attempts by the fictional Otto Silbermann (Robert Neumark Jones) to leave Germany. His attempts aren’t helped by the state changing the name on his identity card to Otto Israel.
Since no Jewish property is safe, he feels compelled to sell his home for a fraction of its price to a supposed friend and then later to do the same with his business.
When the authorities come aggressively banging on his front door, he barely escapes the back way, having to leave behind his non-Jewish wife Elfriede (Kelly Price).
The rest of the show takes him on train journeys across the country, briefly meeting numerous characters from the irritable, chess-playing SA man to three soldiers singing in a third-class compartment.
At one point, a communist chauffeur takes him to the border with Belgium, but getting across that border is more difficult than he could imagine.
Our sympathies are always with Otto, but he is the only character we get to know. The show is carried by the tension of the atmosphere rather than any characterisation, powerful speeches or the exploration of ideas.
The well-judged choreography and the expressionist mood of a thriller, emphasised by the lighting and sounds, hold our attention through this terrifying journey.