The Silence of the Sea, Trafalgar Studios - review

Actions speak louder than words in wartime France
2 February 2013

It’s an audacious move to stage a play about silence. Yet this is exactly what the Donmar Warehouse, for the third and final offering in its laudable Trafalgar Studios season giving recent trainee directors the chance to spread their wings with a full production, has done. Playwright Anthony Weigh has come up with a clever, if dramatically problematic, stage version of Vercors’s classic 1942 novella about French resistance to German occupation. Vercors’s villagers have one lethally effective tactic: they refuse to speak to the Nazis billeted in their homes.

If this Donmar project is all about showing off the young directors to best advantage, Simon Evans fares very well. It’s a confident production of a tricky text, greatly aided by an accomplished palette of sound effects from Gregory Clarke. Impressively, the wordlessness of Young Woman (Simona Bitmaté), who is still silent at the 90-minute mark, becomes just as eloquent as speech. Bitmaté has a compelling quality of stillness.

As so often happens, the woman sits quietly while the men gabble away. German officer Werner (Leo Bill, whose superciliousness crumbles credibly into vulnerability) talks desperately at Older Man (Finbar Lynch) and his niece, while Lynch narrates to us his take on the situation. Lengthy monologues, not always the easiest thing to watch, are thus the order of the day. Sometimes you feel that the Young Woman — and indeed the sea — had the best idea.

Until Feb 2 (0844 871 7632, donmarwarehouse.com)

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