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Fiona Mountford's rating
The New World Order, Barbican at Shoreditch Town Hall - Review
By
Fiona Mountford
25 Nov 2011
Now this is what I call site-specific. Under the auspices of the Barbican, event theatre specialists Hydrocracker have had the ingenious idea of amalgamating and staging five of Harold Pinter's short, late political plays in the wonderfully appropriate setting of Shoreditch Town Hall. As we move around this elegant space, from the grandeur of the council rooms upstairs - Press Conference - to the horrors of the basement - Mountain Language - we gain increasingly chilling evidence of a brutal and repressive state.
Director Ellie Jones and her team have thought everything through most impressively, by no means a given with this sort of project. Once we've passed through initial security, we gain admittance to the sinister-sounding Ministry of Cultural Integrity, peopled wordlessly by guards in shades and besuited functionaries.
The Minister of Culture (Hugh Ross), formerly head of the secret police, is hell-bent on destroying one family of benign dissidents, a mission we see brought to its terrifying conclusion downstairs.
In this last section the frighteners are put on us too, as we are picked off and separated from fellow audience members, to the sounds of shouting from behind closed doors. Pinter, the master of menace, would surely have revelled in this.
Until December 11 (020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
