Meesterlijk

In keeping with the agenda of Utrecht’s Theatergroep Ponies and with the pertinent subtitle ‘Why Are You looking?’, Scala is a play that serves up a subtle glimpse of alienation in modern society. As a well-dressed woman arrives at a swanky restaurant for dinner with her best friend, her grip on reality abruptly vanishes. At first she lurches in shock, but soon finds a certain pleasure in the surreal objectivity her newfound condition provides her as she mentally floats around the other diners.

From the moment she steps onstage and dizzily debates which hook to hang her coat on, Anna Hermanns hits an unsettlingly dark balance of humour and paranoia. And although the performance is a tad too high-octane from the outset and so loses a degree of emotional fine-tuning, she is utterly compelling as the hapless guest coping with her social breakdown. Meanwhile, Lize van Olden is delicately long-suffering in the challenging role of the ever-silent dinner partner.

In a team effort, Hermanns adapts Enver Husicic’s Dutch text in a fluid English translation by Terry Ezra, while director Ria Marks crafts from the result a tautly emotional set-piece that gets all your thought pathways working by the climactic final course.

This is the first in a new series of plays selected from the cutting edge of Dutch theatre (‘meesterlijk’ translates as ‘virtuoso’). Scala successfully whets the appetite for more.