The Unconquered

Published Friday 14 March 2008 at 17:10 by Thom Dibdin

There are no pulled-punches in Stellar Quines’ revival of The Unconquered, which tours Scotland and London before transferring to New York. The new cast find all the poetic glory in Torben Betts’ repetitious script, while Muriel Romanes’ strong direction ensures that every vicious nuance is as clear as Keith McIntyre’s cartoonish, line-drawn design.

Nicola Harrison excels as the Girl, railing against her parent’s apathy - but so involved in her books that she doesn’t notice the popular uprising taking place in her country. Alexandra Mathie and Neil McKinven are spot on as the comfortable, middle-class couple living out the ritualised obligations of their loveless marriage. Neal Barry creates a horribly repellent Soldier, “liberating” the country from itself, and is even more so as he becomes part of the occupying civilian force.

Key to the production’s success is the way the company allow the humanity to burst up through the two-dimensional ritual of the lines. In particular, Harrison puts herself right on the line. She draws it all together with a performance that bristles with the frustration of anger that is unable to find a way of expressing itself except through self-harm.

Mathie’s sorrow that her daughter does not appreciate her own sacrifice is self-pitying enough to presage her ambivalence to the Girl’s later rape by the Soldier. Similarly, McKinven’s self-satisfied comfort in his commercial drudgery presages his later embracing of the violating father of his grandchild - and desertion of his own wife.

A production of great power and resonance that takes Betts’ caricatured world and breathes life into it, bearing a scary resemblance to our own.