Judgment Day

Published Friday 11 September 2009 at 13:50 by Mark Shenton

Following fatal train crashes like the ones at Paddington, Potters Bar, Southall and Hatfield, there have been recurring attempts to hold someone accountable, but corporate manslaughter charges have repeatedly failed to stick. Instead, the companies held responsible have been merely fined, barely making a dent in their profits.

Perhaps their senior executives should be sent to see Odon von Horvath’s unsettling, uncompromising portrait of a normally diligent stationmaster facing his own moral responsibilities, following a train crash that his momentary inattention to setting the right signal caused, and examine their own consciences, too.

It’s amazing when a play of the past speaks to us so powerfully in the present, but it’s not just the disturbing frequency of major train crashes that makes us look at this play with fresh eyes. It’s also the potency of von Horvath’s deep understanding of the ambiguities of human nature and his meticulous bedding-in of the community that the stationmaster is part of that make this an intense, complex and remorselessly gripping moral thriller. It should be a stage classic, in the tradition of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

But weirdly, this play - originally premiered in 1937 - had to wait until 1989 to receive its British premiere, when Stephen Daldry staged it at the Old Red Lion. But it appears to have been shelved again in the years since. Now, however, English playwright Christopher Hampton continues his virtually single-handed rehabilitation of the playwright’s work, whose Tales from the Vienna Wood he translated for the Olivier’s first season in 1976-7 and did the screenplay for a subsequent film version of, before tackling Don Juan Comes Back from the War for the Cottesloe and Faith, Hope and Charity for the Lyric Hammersmith. He also made the playwright the central character of his 1984 National Theatre original play, Tales from Hollywood.

In his new version of Judgment Day for the Almeida, he expertly reveals it as a gripping and overwhelmingly powerful portrait of a man facing up to the wrath of his own conscience, and a wife and community he has compromised as he has sought to protect himself.

Director James Macdonald and his designer Miriam Buether give it a stunning fluidity that keeps changing perspective and location, and orchestrate the public and personal dimensions of the story that a stunning ensemble cast bring to astonishingly inhabited life. Joseph Millson as the stationmaster, with Suzanne Burden as his spurned wife and Laura Donnelly as Anna (whose brief flirtation with him causes him to neglect his duties), carry the weight of the plot, but there are no less telling contributions from Sarah Woodward as a town gossip, Tom Georgeson as the innkeeper and Daniel Hawksford as the butcher fiancee of the young woman.