Outside on the Street

Written in six days after escaping a prisoner-of-war camp at the end of World War II, Wolfgang Borchert’s semi-autobiographical play is a surreal exploration of trauma and guilt in a ghostly Hamburg where the dark flow of the river Elbe offers blissful oblivion.

Sergeant Beckmann returns from Siberia to find another man in his bed, his parents dead and God snivelling in a back alley. He’s a walking corpse in a society determined to bury its past. Borchert's writing pulses with bitter, disgusted amusement as he depicts fatuous colonels and laughable theatre-makers with no interest in the truth Beckmann tries to speak.

Theatre group Invertigo stage the play in a wasteland of wire-framed crates, which they shift with fluid ease into new shapes and forms. It’s a simple and strikingly effective way of conveying the unrelenting harshness of Beckmann’s existence as he paces the streets in search of any kind of solace.

Paapa Essiedu imbues Beckmann with increasingly grinning fatalism while the rest of the talented all-male cast play instruments and cycle through different accents and mannerisms to play the people he encounters. Tom Clegg is particularly good, strutting archly across the stage as a variety of grotesque male and female characters.

Director Owen Horsley’s production is slick, stylish and well-judged, making a powerful aesthetic statement. If anything, it’s too well formed. The play’s yawning bleakness is offered up to the audience as a perfectly constructed theatrical object. It’s intellectually stimulating but could do with punching us in the gut a few more times.