this week in theater

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: KINGS OF WAR

Innovative director Ivo van Hove merges four Shakespeare plays into one monumental production in KINGS OF WAR at BAM (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
November 3-6, $30-$130
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

This past spring, BAM presented the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings,” four Bard plays — Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, and Henry V — done in repertory over more than five weeks. Now superstar director and BAM fave Ivo van Hove, who just staged Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and The Crucible back-to-back on Broadway in addition to Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop, returns to Brooklyn with Kings of War, a 264-minute extravaganza that merges Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II & III, and Richard III in contemporary surroundings. The cast features Ramsey Nasr as Henry V, Hans Kesting as Richard III, Eelco Smits as Henry VI, Hélène Devos as Lady Anne, Bart Siegers as Edward IV, Marieke Heebink as the Duchess of York, Leon Voorberg as Charles VI, and Alwin Pulinckx as the Prince of Wales. The Toneelgroep Amsterdam production, in a Dutch translation by Rob Klinkenberg adapted by Bart van den Eynde and Peter van Kraaij, is designed and lit, as always, by Jan Versweyveld, with costumes by An D’Huys and projections by Tal Yarden. There will also be a live brass band along with contratenor Steve Dugardin performing music by Eric Sleichim. Van Hove has previously staged Antigone, Angels in America, Opening Night, Cries and Whispers, and Roman Tragedies at BAM. Despite his innovative, often multimedia staging, both experimental and awe-inspiring, Van Hove is not just about dazzling production values. As BAM’s Christian Barclay notes in his BAMblog essay “Tragedy, Power, and Catharsis: Ivo van Hove’s Theatrical Humanism,” “At BAM, Van Hove’s intuitive, visionary approach to theater has now struck five times over just the past eight years (with all but one of the productions staged with his Dutch company, Toneelgroep Amsterdam). While certainly diverse in scope, from minimalist reimaginings of classic texts to wholly original screen-to-stage adaptations, all of Van Hove’s work could be said to proffer an acute examination of human behavior.” Kings of War will play a mere four performances at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, running November 3-6, and according to the program there is only one intermission. Consider yourselves warned.

DOOMOCRACY

Will Star/Shooting Stars Pro (photo courtesy of Creative Time)

Voting rights is only one of the hot-button topics explored in Pedro Reyes’s political house of horrors (photo by Will Star/Shooting Stars Pro; courtesy of Creative Time)

Brooklyn Army Terminal
58th St. between First & Second Aves.
Through November 6, free, 6:00 – 12 midnight
creativetime.org
www.pedroreyes.net

While other New Yorkers were going to costume parties or trick-or-treating with their kids, I spent Halloween night in a political house of horrors deep in Brooklyn. Through November 6, Creative Time, the New York City nonprofit arts organization that has presented such outstanding site-specific projects as Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety” at the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory, “Drifting in Daylight” in Central Park, Mike Nelson’s “A Psychic Vacuum” in the Old Essex Street Market, and Duke Riley’s “Fly by Night” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, has now turned its attention to the state of the nation as a contentious and perverse presidential election comes to a close. Mexican multidisciplinary artist and activist Pedro Reyes’s labyrinthine, Dada-esque Doomocracy has taken over the Brooklyn Army Terminal, where a dozen people at a time are guided through a series of scripted vignettes that deal with police brutality, voting rights, school safety, corporate greed, the health-care system, climate change, pollution, the unequal distribution of wealth, drone attacks, and other hot-button issues.

A candy coffin salesman (Matthew Korahais) takes a sweet view of death in participatory Creative Time project at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (photo by Will Star/Shooting Stars Pro; courtesy of Creative Time)

Directed by Meghan Finn, written by Paul Hufker, and curated by Creative Time artistic director Nato Thompson, Doomocracy is fully interactive; after being hauled into a van and driven to a secret spot, you will be pushed and prodded, get yelled at, be forced to climb four flights of stairs, burrow through a narrow corridor, and play a game of soccer over the course of about sixty minutes. Some of the scenarios are goofier than others, constructed with a low-budget DIY sensibility that you just have to go with, but they all make their points (although there’s a serious flaw in the abortion-related room), revealing the darker sides of America that we seem powerless to stop. The cast features more than thirty actors; standouts include Marjorie Conn as a voting poll receptionist, Matthew Korahais as a ghoulish coffin salesman, Carolina Do as a futuristic artisanal air saleswoman, and Joseph Gregori as a park ranger who offers the best surprise of the night. And it’s a thrill just walking through the nearly century-old army terminal, which was designed by Cass Gilbert during WWI to serve as a military depot and supply base and currently functions as an industrial warehouse and commercial complex managed by the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The fully booked Doomocracy also fits in well with the recent Escape Room craze, where people have to solve puzzles to proceed, but in this case there appears to be no real way out from this endless national nightmare.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S CORIOLANUS

Dion Johnstone is fierce as Coriolanus in bloody Red Bull production (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Barrow Street Theatre
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Tuesday – Sunday through November 20, $80-$100
www.redbulltheater.com
barrowstreettheatre.com

Director Michael Sexton and Red Bull Theater transport one of William Shakespeare’s lesser-known, lesser-performed plays, Coriolanus, to up-to-the-minute contemporary times in a fast and furious immersive adaptation bursting with passion and energy. Set and lighting designer Brett J. Banakis has transformed the Barrow Street Theatre into the site of an Occupy movement in Rome, where hungry young citizens (Edward O’Blenis, Olivia Reis, and others) are protesting the government’s control of corn. “We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us,” one citizen proclaims. “If they would yield us but the superfluity, we might guess they relieved us humanely. But they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us is as an inventory to particularize their abundance. Our sufferance is as a gain to them. Let us revenge it with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.” While patrician Menenius Agrippa (Patrick Page) understands their complaints, his good friend, Roman general Cauis Martius (Dion Johnstone), dismisses the Occupiers as “dissentious rogues” and “fragments.” Later, when Martius returns a hero in the battle against Corioles and his archenemy, Tullus Aufidius (Matthew Amendt), earning him the new name Coriolanus, the citizens, spurred on by manipulative tribunes Brutus (Merritt Janson) and Sicinius (Stephen Spinella), decide to do whatever they can to prevent him from becoming elected consul, taking up weapons and smashing ballot boxes. As Coriolanus’s pride and power grow, his mother, Volumnia (Lisa Harrow), his wife, Virgilia (Rebecca S’manga Frank), their son (Reis), and family friend Valeria (Christina Pumariega), a chaste lady of Rome, try to tone down the rhetoric and focus on his humanity, but there appears to be no stopping an inevitable, and bloody, conclusion.

The exquisite Patrick Page is once again at his best as Menenius Agrippa in CORIOLANUS (photo by Carol Rosegg)

It might be Rome, 493 BCE, but it could just as easily be America, 2016, inside the Barrow Street Theatre. A platform juts out from the stage, with the audience sitting around three sides. The characters enter and leave by weaving through the aisles, often interacting with the crowd, shaking hands, giving them a balloon, or handing out ballots. The immersive structure helps cover up some of the play’s difficulties and deficiencies, particularly after Coriolanus is banished and considers joining up with Aufidius to take Rome forcefully. In his U.S. debut, Stratford Festival star Johnstone is fierce and aggressive in a challenging role that does not offer much subtlety; it is easier to get frustrated by Coriolanus’s choices than to get behind him as a heroic figure. Page (Casa Valentina, Spring Awakening), one of New York City’s finest and most natural stage actors, nearly steals the show as Menenius, his dialogue rolling eloquently off his tongue in a thrilling baritone that rattles through the theater; his Menenius is like a modern-day campaign manager unable to rein in his boss from certain self-destruction. Janson (TFANA’s Tamburlaine the Great, Notes from Underground) and two-time Tony winner Spinella (Angels in America, Red Bull’s Volpone) evoke a devious teaming of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, taking dastardly delight as political puppeteers fomenting rebellion. Harrow (Wit, Last Days of Chez Nous) is divinely elegant as Coriolanus’s distressed though determined mother, while Aaron Krohn is strong and stalwart as Coriolanus’s devoted right-hand man, General Cominius; Zachary Fine is a hoot as Titus Lartius and several others; and Amendt plays Aufidius like he’s a wasted British rock star. And costume designer Ásta Bennie Hostetter has fun with the outfits, from bold military uniforms to dapper suits, from hoodies to an Occupier’s T-shirt that says, “There is no capitalism without racism.” Longtime character actor Dakin Matthews, who has appeared in such recent political plays as The Audience and All the Way and was formerly artistic director of the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, serves as dramaturg, noting in the program that Coriolanus “must appear before the people in humble garb, displaying his wounds and getting their ‘voices’ (votes), and then have their election confirmed by the people’s tribunes, who are so opposed to his elevation that they conspire to deny it to him by manipulating the people’s affections,” which sounds eerily familiar given what is happening in the current presidential campaign. Sexton (Shakespeare’s Margaret for Red Bull, Titus Andronicus at the Public), artistic director of the Shakespeare Society, keeps things chaotically orderly and involving, although a drug-party scene goes a bit over the top even as it adds needed humor. Red Bull excels at reviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plays (Volpone, The School for Scandal, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore), and Coriolanus is yet another triumph for this always inventive and extremely talented company.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

John Glover, Joel Grey, Diane Lane, and Chuck Cooper squeeze into new Broadway adaptation of THE CHERRY ORCHARD (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $59-$149
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Rising Roundabout scribe Stephen Karam takes a curious pause in his soaring career with a misbegotten adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic comic drama, The Cherry Orchard. Karam’s two previous plays, 2011’s Sons of the Prophet and 2014’s The Humans, were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and the latter won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play when it was off Broadway and then the Tony for Best Play after transferring to the Great White Way. But his new version of The Cherry Orchard, in an exasperating production helmed by National Theatre associate director Simon Goodwin (The Beaux’ Stratagem, Routes), is sour from the very start. Chekhov’s plot is familiar to most theatergoers: After living in Paris for five years following the death of her husband and the tragic drowning of her seven-year-old-son, Grisha, Madame Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (Diane Lane) returns to the family home with her entourage, only to find that the entire estate, including her beloved cherry orchard, is going to be sold at auction because of failure to pay off massive debts. Yermolai Alekseyevich Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau), a successful businessman whose father and grandfather worked as serfs on the estate, offers a plan to save the house by cutting down the orchard and replacing it with vacation villas, but Lyubov and her arrogant brother, Leonid Andreyevich Gaev (John Glover), will have none of it, acting like spoiled children, refusing to face the direness of their situation. Also refusing to accept reality is Lyubov’s daughter, Anya (Tavi Gevinson), and her adopted daughter, Varya (Celia Keenan-Bolger). The family circle is filled out by governess and magician Charlotta Ivanovna (Tina Benko), family friend and landowner Boris Borisovich Simeonov-Pischik (Chuck Cooper), local clerk Semyon Panteleyevich Yepikhodov (Quinn Mattfeld), Grisha’s former teacher and current student Pyotr Sergeyevich Trofimov (Kyle Beltran), maid (Dunyasha), young servant Yasha (Maurice Jones), and doddering old servant Firs (Joel Grey). In addition, violinist Bryan Hernandez-Luch, clarinetist Liam Burke, and percussionist Chihiro Shibayama add cinematic music first from the sidelines, then from the back of the stage. But it’s all for naught.

Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau) tries to convince Madame Lyubov (Diane Lane) of the fate of the cherry orchard in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

Chekhov’s plays are ripe for reinterpretation. This year alone has brought the Pearl’s Stupid Fucking Bird and Peter Pan Theatre’s The Seagull and Other Birds, two wildly inventive reimaginings of The Seagull, while the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg’s production of The Cherry Orchard at BAM was a brilliant, immersive take on the tragicomedy. But Karam and Godwin throw too much into the mix, getting trapped in a no-man’s land between traditional and experimental, classical and contemporary, realistic and metaphorical. Michael Krass’s costumes are all over the place, from sharp, modern-day suits to old-fashioned Eastern European garb, as is Karam’s dialogue. “What is it you’d say . . . ?” Madame Lyubov asks Gaev early on. “What’s the lingo?” And stage directions such as “Varya and Anya share a moment of ‘What the hell was that?!’” certainly don’t help. Karam also shifts the idea of serfdom into slavery, which Godwin overdoes by casting black actors as Lopakhin, Trofimov, and Pischik. Most of the play takes place in the nursery, which set designer Scott Pask has outfitted with tiny chairs and tables, Alexander Calder-like mobiles hanging from the ceiling, a toy village, and a mobile of small hot-air balloons hovering over a child’s bed. Yes, we get it; virtually all of the characters are acting like children. And it turns out to be more cringe-worthy than funny when the rather large Cooper wiggles into one of the chairs. The floor is an enormous trunk of a tree that has been chopped down, its myriad rings representing the changing times and generations, evoking the eventual fate of the cherry orchard and the Russian aristocracy — as well as this production itself.

OH, HELLO

George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) and Gil Faizon (Nick Kroll) make their Broadway debut in OH, HELLO (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 22, $59- $159
ohhellobroadway.com

It’s no mean feat to turn brief comedy sketches into feature-length productions; just ask Saturday Night Live, which has produced such critical flops as It’s Pat, A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar, The Ladies Man, and MacGruber. Yet somehow, Upright Citizens Brigade regular Nick Kroll and former SNL writer John Mulaney, who started performing as opinionated aging showbiz hangers-on Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland, respectively, in the East Village club Rififi in 2005 and later at the Cherry Lane Theatre and on the Comedy Central series Kroll Show from January 2013 to March 2015, have transformed their absurdist two-minute bits into the Broadway smash Oh, Hello, an uproarious send-up of celebrity culture and the Great White Way itself. The goofy, sloppy Faizon and the eccentric, possible serial killer St. Geegland, the hosts of the cable access show Too Much Tuna, have finally reached the big time, making it to Broadway with a play about themselves, a pair of old Upper West Side vaudeville types whose rent is suddenly going up from $75 to thousands a month. Desperate to keep their longtime abode, Faizon, who still hurts from losing a CBS announcing gig decades before, and St. Geegland, the author of the seminal works Next Stop, Ronkonkoma and Rifkin’s Dilemma, try to score a gig on NY1, as if that will make everything right. Amid self-deprecating riffs and a deep, abiding love for the music of Steely Dan, the two old guys manage to put on quite a show.

Septuagenarian Upper West Side pranksters prepare for entrance of F. Murray Abraham in OH, HELLO (photo by Joan Marcus)

Oh, Hello, named after the two men’s trademark greeting, is a clever and inventive one hundred nonstop minutes of hilarity, as fellow Georgetown grads Mulaney and Kroll — who were inspired to create the characters after seeing a pair of elderly men, attached at the hip, both purchasing a copy of Alan Alda’s autobiography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, at the Strand — try to crack each other up as much as the audience, particularly in their offbeat, offhanded pronunciations of various words and phrases that just make no sense. Scott Pask’s ramshackle set matches Faizon and St. Geegland’s dishevelment to a T, made up of leftover detritus from other shows, including family photos from an August Wilson play. Inside references abound, some that you will get, and some that you won’t, but little does that matter. There are even jokes about Alda, Bobby Cannavale, Aziz Ansari, and Griffin Dunne — Griffin Dunne? — but it turns out that each of those actors have made surprise guest appearances on the prank show Too Much Tuna. (We got John Oliver the night we went, and the Last Week Tonight host couldn’t stop laughing, which was infectious.) Kroll and Mulaney never miss a chance at a visual gag or a ridiculous pun, from the bit of shirt peeking through Faizon’s zipper, to both of them ripping unseen tech intern Ruvi Nandan, to John Slattery and Jon Hamm supposedly serving as their understudies. Two-time Tony nominee Alex Timbers, who has directed such elaborate productions as Here Lies Love, Rocky, and Peter and the Starcatcher in addition to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, goes with the flow, relishing all of the shabby DIY madness. And yes, there is definitely too much tuna. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you like Mulaney or Kroll individually or whether you were a fan of Kroll Show; everyone is welcome to say Oh, Hello.

REQUEST CONCERT

Danuta Stenka gives a bold, bravura performance in hypnotic revival of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s REQUEST CONCERT (photo by Richard Termine)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: WUNSCHKONZERT
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 26-29, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Danuta Stenka is absolutely mesmerizing in Request Concert, Laznia Nowa Theater and TR Warszawa’s intense, ingenious revival of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 hyperrealistic play, a treatise on the state of loneliness and isolation in contemporary society. As the audience enters BAM’s intimate Fishman Space at the Fisher, Polish star Stenka (Krum, Angels in America), as Fräulein Rasch, is already onstage, standing still, midstep, returning home from her job as a stenographer. The stage, designed by Simona Biekšaitė and Zane Pihlstrom, is a studio apartment complete with kitchen, washing machine, shower, sofa bed, and bathroom in the center of the theater, on a wooden platform just off the ground. The audience is encouraged to walk around the set as Fräulein Rasch meticulously goes about her nightly routines, changing into comfy clothes, making dinner, checking the mail, and watching television, all done with an exquisite care consumed by emptiness and melancholy. She never speaks as she butters pieces of crispbread, takes drags off a cigarette, uses the (working) toilet, glances at the haute couture fashion show on TV, and pages through IKEA and Costco catalogs. Aside from a red chair, her apartment is all white and gray, small and drab yet coldly functional, with no identity of its own. It all combines for a heartbreaking portrait of solitude, made all the more sad by Stenka’s slow, studied movement and deep stares filled with longing and, perhaps, fear. The only dialogue comes from a radio program she listens to, with host Ari Shapiro (of NPR) reading letters about new lovers and happy families and playing related songs by the Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, and a band that Shapiro sings with, Pink Martini. When Fräulein Rasch sits down at her laptop, she turns on a Sims-like video game in which she has created her own alternate universe, a man, a woman, and children living in a computer-animated room based on her own surroundings. Her isolation is devastating.

Gracefully directed with sensitivity and subtlety by Yana Ross (Bambiland), Request Concert is like a modern-day version of Chantal Akerman’s 1973 minimalist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, only live and in person, with the audience getting close enough to touch the performer, as there are no barriers separating Stenka from the people walking around the set, hypnotized by her every gesture; not a single action is wasted in a brave and bold tour de force. It’s so realistic that at times you’ll feel like you’re infringing on Fräulein Rasch’s privacy, wanting to look away, but you won’t be able to. We learn almost nothing about her, yet we learn everything; she is no one, yet she is everyone, the set both a zoolike cage and a mirror on ourselves. The only reason we know that she is a stenographer — a job that requires a certain anonymity and lack of personal identity, taking down the words of others with precise exactitude — is because it says so in the program. For nearly seventy-five minutes, Fräulein Rasch, and Stenka, avoids making eye contact with anyone until. . . . Well, to say more would deprive those lucky enough to score a ticket the surprise of a hypnotic finale you won’t soon forget. The show is best experienced by moving around what essentially is a living installation, following Fräulein Rasch’s captivating boredom and ritualistic behavior from every angle; standing in one place the whole time is actually unfair to those attempting to take full advantage of this unique and critical element. For those who do need to sit, there are chairs in the balcony, offering a different perspective.

PLENTY

Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett) and Susan Traherne (Rachel Weisz) unexpectedly meet at a WWII drop site in Public Theater revival of PLENTY (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Newman Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 1, $90-$95
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

“I don’t know why anybody lives in this country,” Alice Park (Emily Bergl) tells her best friend, Susan Traherne (Rachel Weisz), at the beginning of David Hare’s Plenty, which explores the failed promise of plenty in post-WWII England. The show is being revived at the Public, where it made its U.S. debut in 1982, directed by Hare, and later moved to Broadway, where it earned four Tony nominations, including Best Play. This first major New York City revival is a compelling if not wholly successful production that travels back and forth in time, shuffling between 1943 and 1962 in nonlinear fashion. The story centers on Susan, a strong woman who speaks her mind, even as she starts losing control of it. She goes from being a secret courier in France during the war to a diplomat’s wife to a feminist who refuses to rely on a man to make her happy. “I’d like to change everything but I don’t know how,” she tells Alice. Susan meets a series of men she carefully manipulates, from her caring dullard of a husband, Raymond Brock (a finely mustachioed Corey Stoll), who works for old-fashioned ambassador Leonard Darwin (the always excellent Byron Cummings), and Mick (LeRoy McClain), a potential baby daddy, to Sir Andrew Charleson (Paul Niebanck), head of the Foreign Office, and Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett), an English paratrooper. Susan declares exactly what she’s thinking, not worried about who she might offend or how it will affect her marriage or reputation. But true happiness is just out of reach, a parable of England’s efforts to resurrect itself after the war. “This is hell,” Susan says. “No doubt,” Alice agrees, a far cry from the “peace and plenty” they, and all of England, were expecting.

The English argue over their future in return of David Hare’s PLENTY to Public Theater (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hare is undergoing quite a resurgence recently, with major revivals of Skylight on Broadway and The Judas Kiss at BAM (and around the world) and his latest film, Denial, which he wrote for director Mick Jackson, now in theaters, also starring Weisz. In Plenty, Weisz, in the role originated by Kate Nelligan and later played on film by Meryl Streep in 1985 and onstage in London by Cate Blanchett in 1999, is superb as Susan, bringing a wide range of emotions to a character whose fears are getting the best of her even as she fights for her personal freedom. (The film also starred Tracey Ullman as Alice, Charles Dance as Brock, John Gielgud as Darwin, Sting as Mick, Ian McKellen as Charleson, and Sam Neill as Lazar; the original Public Theater production featured Nelligan, Edward Herrmann, Kelsey Grammer, and Dominic Chianese.) Some of the scenes fall flat, feeling out-of-date, particularly when Susan, Brock, and the aptly named Darwin meet with the Burmese ambassador (Pun Bandhu) and his wife (Ann Sanders) and briefly discuss the Suez Canal crisis, which has little impact on contemporary American audiences. Mike Britton’s set features a large horizontal wall that rotates to change scenes, with interstitial jazz by David Van Tieghem as the story goes from Susan and Brock’s house to Darwin’s office to a WWII drop site. Five-time Tony-nominated director David Leveaux (Nine, Anna Christie) never quite reaches a steady narrative flow, as the jumps in time can be confusing. In addition, many of the British references get lost as the disillusioned Susan represents the highs and the lows, the promise and the failure experienced by the country over the course of thirty years. “Oh yes. New Europe. Yes yes,” Darwin says to Brock and Susan early on. “Reconstruction. Massive. Massive work of reconstruction. Jobs. Ideals. Marvellous. Marvellous time to be alive in Europe. No end of it. Roads to be built. People to be educated. Land to be tilled. Lots to get on with. . . . Have another gin.” Or as Brock puts it, “Of course our people are dull, they’re stuffy, they’re death. But what other world do I have?” It’s a world that Susan won’t accept, and it destroys her as well as nearly all those around her.