Everything, everywhere all at once… Slaughterhouse-Five, Southwark Playhouse

 

"All this happened, more or less…”

So goes the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut Jnr’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, widely regarded as amongst his best work and one which contains elements of stunning autobiographical detail. Vonnegut was a US Army Prisoner of War in Dresden at the time of the Allied bombing between 13 and 15 February 1945. He had survived along with other prisoners held deep in the cold store of the abattoir Schlachthof-fünf – as the city above was raised with fatalities currently estimated ranging from 25,000 to 30,000. Either way, so much death… and an attack that was controversial even at the time, with Dresden being an “Open City” with few targets and the architectural heritage of an Oxford with a population of Leeds. Over two thousand RAF and USAF bombers dropped a mix of incendiaries and high explosives… so it goes.

It’s a bit “woke”… but imagine being underneath all of that and having to try and save lives as your side unleashed such destruction? Vonnegut is overwhelmed as his narrator says he didn’t have much to write about it just after the war and not much more to say in 1968: how can you put it into words? So, to deal with senselessness, the incomprehension and inhumanity his way was to come at it from an angle, his meaning and feeling filtered through the shards of a life smashed into fragments by the event and living all of his lifeline out of order, the Event’s meaning for him presenting itself in different ways and at different points. It’s nominally science fiction but it’s also documentary in terms of the human experience.

Alex Crook, Patrick McAndrew and Ethan Reid at war (Photo Henry Hu)

George Roy Hill had a decent if commercially unsuccessful stab at making this into a film in 1972 but to turn it into a play you really do need to be brave. Clearly Eric Simonson is one of those writers who believe that you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps and in director/video designer Douglas Baker he has found a like mind. Using a team of just four actors playing many parts and in various accents as well as the superb design work of Laurel Marks (lighting) and Calum Perrin (sound) they have pulled it off too. After a double Office Award-winning run at the Brockley Jack Theatre in 2024, they have just begun a five-week run here in Southwark and it is complex, energetic and righteously funny – I urge you to see it.

Patrick McAndrew plays Billy Pilgrim who is the author’s cypher albeit an unreliable narrator of his experience with the shock of his capture by German soldiers in 1944 causing him to become unstuck in time so that he experiences his past and future all at once. He also gets kidnapped by an alien race, the Tralfamadorians who also live their lives all at once and who are also two-foot tall and shaped like arms with a single eye in the palm. Their state of existence means they don’t see death as the end of life just one of many things that occur. They are also fatalistic knowing that they destroy the universe experimenting with new fuels for their flying saucers – a test pilot’s error they cannot change as it is already happening/has already happened/will always happen.

Sofia Engstrand (all photographs Henry Hu)

I’m never sure how much of Billy’s extra-terrestrial experience is imagined – Vonnegut was non-committal – but they show Billy’s increasing detachment not least when they provide him with glamour model, Montana Wildhack as a mate whilst keeping him in their zoo. She is played by Sofia Engstrand who doubles up as a German officer, also Bernard O’Hare one of Vonnegut’s friends who was with him in Dresden. All four are performing almost none-stop throughout the play, this is a characterful tour-de-force!

Alex Crook plays, amongst others, frequent KV protagonist/antagonist Kilgore Trout, a bitter and unsuccessful writer of science fiction who Billy likes and again is another Vonnegut cypher. Alex and Ethan Reid play soldiers and as many other characters as they need to, I lost count but both master the American angst especially with Billy’s sworn enemy and future/past assassin Paul Lazzaro. There are so many aspects… and a narrative that slips between the years back and forth as we see Billy move forward from the war to a successful career in optometry, marriage and a family with ill health and tragedy all of a piece.

Back to the future (photo Henry Hu)

 Here is where the staging is so integral to the understanding and feeling of the performance as the scenery, characters and historical events are projected onto the see-through mesh placed centre stage behind which the actors pass in time-dislocated sequences and in front of which they address us in the now… whatever that is? This enables us to see Billy in the war, in Dresden, giving a speech or on the planet of Tralfamador surrounded by the natives looking into his zoo cage and even urinating into a WC… so he goes? 

The choreography is perfect and the atmosphere of the story remains true to Vonnegut’s book as we join with Pilgrim in trying to make sense of the rules of war, the "children" who are sent to fight and the relationship of their sacrifice to our continuing civilization. In that respect, we are all Tralfamadorians now. 

IThankYou appreciation: **** This is an innovative and affecting production that pins the audience back in their seats for an unpredictable journey through time and into inner space. The cast create so much characterful dramatic twists on the Little’s discrete performance space and you are pulled into the most cinematic of live action dramas I’ve seen for some time.

Presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd on behalf of Playscripts, Slaughterhouse-Five runs at the Playhouse until 5^th July. Book now at this address - it's happening now but not always forever. Tralfamador awaits you.

All photographs from Henry Hu