Worth the Journey..?
Just back from a preview of The Visit at the National - 220 minutes (including 2 intervals) of modernised Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Nearly 4 hours of anybody’s money sitting in the theatre is a bit of an ask, even where actors such as Lesley Manville and Hugo Weaving are concerned!
Reset from Switzerland to upstate New York, some of the satire (i.e. about the lack of female suffrage, not achieved in Switzerland to 1971) is lost from the original, and there is probably more emphasis on Greek tragedy, which is perhaps a bit of a red herring.
The impact of a terrible decision can be imagined by the audience, but is never spelled out (and isn’t in the original either) – maybe (certainly!) a fourth act would have been one too far.
But Manville and Weaving, recalling a tragic earlier romance are very effective and quite moving – and the updating and re-location to the post-war USA broadly works.
It’s a huge cast (30 plus child tumblers and a band), which only the National could afford, as is also true of the complex sets and effects.
It could have lost 30 minutes, and one interval, probably, but the time didn’t drag and it did engage pretty well throughout.
If you can spare the time…