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Europe ahead of its time
Written 25 years ago, there's an unnerving prescience to this brilliant play in the era of Brexit, says JAN WOOLF
PIC CAP: Trainspotters: Characters in David Greig’s Europe Pic: Marc Brenner
Europe
Donmar, London
THIS fine production of David Greig’s play by the Donmar’s new artistic director Michael Longhurst is set in a shabby train station on the point of closure in an anonymous Mitteleuropa border town.
All its charm and cultural identity are gone and its inhabitants — whose accents, interestingly, are northern British — yearn for work or escape.
They are becoming nowhere people from a nowhere place trying to grasp a sense of their future, as are two refugees from war-torn former Yugoslavia. The father sleeps on the station seats, with his head resting on his adult daughter’s lap, while she stares desolately into space.
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