Beauty and the bleak

THE PIANIST, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

First seen in an atmospheric Manchester International Festival production in a warehouse in the city’s Science and Industry Museum in 2007, Neil Bartlett’s piano and voice two-hander returns, to the warmer surroundings of the Royal Exchange, to unofficially open this year’s festival.

Once again it is heavily booked and you can see why: it offers intense, heartbreaking and incontrovertible evidence of man’s cruelty to man, and it also manages, paradoxically, to be gloriously beautiful, courtesy of Mikhail Rudy’s reprise of sections of Chopin’s better-known nocturnes, sonatas and preludes.

The whole experience is dreamlike, whether Rudy — who devised the piece — is playing the mid-sized grand piano in subdued lighting, or the mellifluous voice of Peter Guinness is washing over a rapt audience with its stories of life interrupted, in the Warsaw Ghetto in wartime.

The 90-minute, interval-free work is a bleak stripping down of humanity, based on pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s autobiographical account of his war years in Warsaw.

As he went about his daily work, playing in local cafes, the Nazis, assisted by local Jewish policemen, started a considered attack on the Ghetto’s 1.5 million Jews in 1939.

We hear how bodies pile up in the streets, victims of typhus brought about by the terrible conditions; how Szpilman’s own sisters, brother, mother and father are loaded into cattle trucks and carted off, never to be seen again, and how he increasingly descends into a state of semi-madness, civilisation stripped away, as he forages by night for bread, water and other food left behind in the imposed exodus, all the while terrified that his self-imposed solitary years in the mostly-empty city might end with a chance meeting with a German soldier.

It is a heart-rending account, all the more horrible for its matter-of-fact retelling, all forced into high relief by the beauty of musical interludes that resonate gloriously in the confined space of the theatre.

Rudy’s playing is stately and elegiac, as befits the text, while Guinness’s voice is smoky and intoxicating, one that normally tells far more palatable tales. Neil Bartlett’s direction is spare and lacking distraction, and the evening remains a rare experience.