Is it possible to adapt a complex, time-hopping novel with aliens for the stage?
This production of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1968 anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five started life at Brockley Jack Studio and has now transferred to the Southwark Playhouse, and there is plenty that is inventive and slick in how it is staged.
It’s the life story of Billy Pilgrim (Patrick McAndrew), who became a prisoner of war in the Second World War and survived the Dresden bombing.
The action jumps back and forth between life before, during and after the war, including the time he claims to have spent on Tralfamadore, having been abducted by aliens.
With a cast of just four, the story is populated (and told) with the help of multimedia. There is a screen at the back of that stage and second, thin gauzy one a few metres forward with various projections appearing on both.
On a thin, gauzy screen, information such as dates, quotes and animations appear.
When the actors are behind the screen, they can interact with the animations and images. They can look like they are climbing a ladder, being rounded up by German soldiers, or lying in (a vertical) bed.
It’s vivid, inventive, bold and slickly and precisely done by the cast.
There’s a ‘but’. The disjointed nature of the storytelling, the constant back and forth with often just snippets of narrative before time-jumping again make it hard for any emotional resonance to punch through.
It leaves you hankering to go back to certain story threads.
You can see the themes of the brutal futility of war, the horrors inflicted by both sides and what it does to Billy Pilgrim with his PTSD and delusions. It also has interesting things to say about death and our relationship with it.
But its emotional heart is more difficult to find. It feels very matter of fact with just one scene that feeling shocking. That scene involves a man talking about how he took revenge on dog that bit him.
Maybe we’ve become desensitised to human violence nearly 60 years after the novel was published.
Final thoughts
Slaughterhouse-Five is successful in it’s imaginative use of multmedia and the skill with which the actors interact with it.
It feels successful in how it populates a story but given the subject matter it doesn’t have the impact it probably should.
Slaughterhouse-Five, Southwark Playhouse
From the novel by Kurt Vonnegut and adapted by Eric Simonson
Directed by Douglas Baker
Cast: Patrick McAndrew, Alex Crook, Ethan Reid, Sofia Engstrand
Running time: One hour and 35 minutes, no interval
Booking until 4 July.
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