Joanna Murray-Smith’s Berlin was last performed in Melbourne in 2023 (it premiered in 2021). Its success has sparked a short return season with the same director and cast, but now relocated to a different venue. The play starts off quite innocently, but the momentum builds until what started as a romcom evolves into something far more disturbing.
There’s a mystery to be unspooled over the three acts that’s efficiently played out in 80 minutes sans interval. Twenty-something Tom (Lachlan Hamill) is an Australian visiting Berlin, specifically in the gentrified neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, a “Mecca for cashed up hipsters in beanies” as writer/bartender Charlotte (Georgia Latchford) wryly puts it when he stumbles into one of its achingly cool bars and strikes up an awkward conversation with her. The two eventually end up in her apartment at 1am, with the expectation that sexual congress will eventuate.
Seeing as this happens to be a typical Murray-Smith play, Berlin is wordy feat, with the first act in particular full of the couple’s verbal sparring as they try to get to know each other with the usual repartee exchanged between strangers. They are perhaps a little too eloquent to be believable, even for young intellectuals, considering the lateness of the hour and the amount of alcohol they’ve imbibed and are continuing to drink. But this is a problem of Murray-Smith’s script rather than the actors, who do their best to accommodate her playful and sardonic dialogue (that includes reciting snippets of Rilke’s poetry – because why not?).
Nonetheless, Erica Chestnut could direct her charges to slow down a little to let the words sit in stillness and connect with the audience before rushing to the next line. On opening night, Hamill seemed nervous, making a few mistakes and taking a little while to ease into the character of Tom – enthusiastic and charming – but Latchford is fully believable as the curious but guarded Charlotte. She’s also on point with her German accent.
The set, Charlotte’s loft apartment, consists of different size grey blocks, which are assembled in various formations to make up a couch, a sideboard and a table. The entire action takes place in this one space, among the beer and wine bottles, pot plants and record player. So far so normal – but seemingly out of place, there’s also a painting ostensibly by Constable (its placement is integral to the plot).
The pair navigate this room like a dance, coming together and then moving apart – the push and pull of attraction and seduction. In between sharing personal stories of grief and loss, they listen to The Ramones and throw around names for their future children. But little by little, Tom’s and Charlotte’s meet-cute becomes a collision between past and present, and what makes Berlin work is this very tension between the romance and the thriller. Murray-Smith feeds us tropes of both genres, changing gears suddenly and detouring to take a wholly different path than what was initially expected.
To say more about the play would be to risk spoilers. Suffice to say the narrative explores the uneasy juxtaposition of a capital city that is abuzz with (sub)cultures and young creatives building their own paths and yet is also one forever yoked to a history stained with blood. How do Berliners live with the burden of their nation’s war crimes that are memorialised in plaques everywhere? What’s the fallout of a party town wanting to forget its past instead of feeling forever obligated to commemorate it?
Among other things, Murray Smith asks us to consider moral responsibility even though one may not be personally guilty of any wrongdoing and the ethics of profiteering from the actions of our forebears. There are no easy answers and the play canvasses different perspectives with the vigour of a debating team led by the two team leaders.
Read: Book review: Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts
Apart from a few niggles, including the fact that the ending would work better if it were cased in an ambivalent tone, this is an intelligently written and directed two-hander with Hamill and Latchford reprising their roles with requisite intensity.
Berlin by Joanna Murray-Smith
Meat Market, North Melbourne
Director: Erica Chestnut
Set Design: Leah Downey
Lighting design: Jason Bovair
Music: Jarman Oakley
Cast: Georgia Latchford, Lachlan Hamill
Tickets: $40-$45
Berlin will be performed until 8 March 2025.
