Posted: Tue., Feb. 10, 2009, 1:41pm PT

Abroad

The Stone

(Jerwood Theater Downstairs, London; 385 seats; £25 $37 top)

By Karen Fricker

'The Stone'

A Royal Court Theater presentation of a play in one act by Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade. Directed by Ramin Gray.

Hannah … Loo Brealey Heidrun … Helen Schlesinger Witha … Linda Bassett Mieze … Justine Mitchell Stefanie … Amanda Drew Wolfgang … Jonathan Cullen

Marius von Mayenburg's shockingly short new play offers further indication (alongside books and films like "The Reader") that the current age in Germany is one of profound reckoning with the Nazi past. In Ramin Gray's uncompromising production, moments in the past of six characters are presented alongside each other, and the audience is challenged to uncover the lies at the center of one family's story. Time, space and even character are flattened; the experience feels like a combination of human science experiment and truth-and-reconciliation commission. And it's the role of representation itself in such grave matters that may be on trial.

Play premiered at the Salzburg Festival, in a co-production with Berlin's Schaubuhne, last July; this production is the first in the Royal Court's current season of new plays about Germany.

The actors walk through the theater to take their place in Johannes Schutz's sickly blue box set; their costumes indicate differences in time period, from the 1930s to approximately the present. Through short passages of dialogue we discover all are connected through a house in Dresden.

Veterinarian Wolfgang (Jonathan Cullen) and his wife Witha (Linda Bassett) buy the house from a Jewish couple (we only meet the wife, Mieze, played by Justine Mitchell) in 1935; Wolfgang's family leave the house after the war for reasons that are at the heart of the play's mystery. It is illegally occupied in the 1970s and '80s by a family including Stefanie (Amanda Drew); and then reinhabited by Witha's adult daughter Heidrun (Helen Schlesinger) and her family, including teenage daughter Hannah (Loo Brealey), in the 1990s.

The details that accrue slowly erode the heroic narrative passed down to Hannah, in which her grandfather Wolfgang saved Mieze's family before the war and helped them escape to America. The clues we are presented with range from allusive and devastating (Heidrun asking Witha why she was given such a "Nordic" first name) to, late in the play, shockingly direct (Mieze attacking the piano she is being forced to leave behind with an axe).

Digging (many secrets are literally buried in the back yard) becomes a metaphor for the larger activity in which the play is engaged: uncovering the past, sifting through German history for some unattractively dirty truths. The brevity of the piece, and the cruelly stripped-back nature of Gray's production, are at the center of its effectiveness and its message, and both play and production avoid sentimentality.

The forensic nature of von Mayenburg and Gray's approach raises the implicit question of whether there's a right and moral way to raise the issue of complicity with the Nazi regime through artistic creativity. "The Stone" certainly isn't traditional entertainment, though for those who like their theater knotty and thought-provoking, it brings with it certain inevitably troubling pleasures.

Sets and costumes, Johannes Shutz; lighting, Matt Drury; sound, David McSeveney; production stage manager, Paul Handley. Opened, reviewed Feb. 9, 2009. Running time: 1 HOUR.