The Passenger review – wartime drama has a noirish haze but no real darkness

Finborough theatre, London
A symbolic, stripped-down staging fails to plumb the chilling emotional depths of this story about a Jewish man trying to flee Germany in the 1930s

A wealthy Jewish businessman takes a series of Kafkaesque journeys on the German train system soon after Kristallnacht, driven from his home and in flight for his life. Otto Silbermann never makes it out of the country but – maddeningly – loops round and round, stuck in the trap of rising Nazi terror and afraid of every passenger he meets. He carries a suitcase of money, the last vestige of power he has in a homeland that has turned against Jews.

The Passenger is based on Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel, which was written at blazing speed when Boschwitz, himself a German Jew, was just 23. His manuscript was discovered decades after his death in 1942, at the age of 27.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/952CkjX

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