Iona Firouzabadi
posted 26 August 2006

Immersed in their memories of a single night, five figures sit in a row, isolated from each other. Three are civilian victims – they are German. Two are military aggressors – they are British. They tell of a moment in history – the firebombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Offering no moral judgement, Darren Ormandy's Hamburg is a deceptively calm and static production that communicates the earthly hell of war.

We first meet, not the characters, but the city of Hamburg. We see it through the words of its citizens - a father figure, a young man and young woman. This is the opposite of urban alienation. Here the city is its people and the people are the city.  What the Royal Air Force bombed was not just mortar but flesh. Hamburg does not make this point explicitly – it is a production that is often as understated as German emotion and the British sense of humour. Indeed, the similarity between the characters of the two nations is sketched in the script. The topographies of blitzed London and bombed Hamburg are also superimposed – we learn that the Hamburg fire-storm covered four square miles, a distance that would stretch from the Tower of London to Hyde Park, from King’s Cross to Waterloo. 

While the staging remains resolutely inert and the cast’s delivery is largely impassive, characterised by haunted thousand-yard stares, the imagery of the writing is vivid and resonant of biblical apocalypse. The phosphorous bombs are likened to ‘cathedrals of light’ and ‘Christmas trees, falling slowly in silence’; they comprise a ‘rain of fire from heaven’ and ‘the end of the world’.  

In this context the British are avenging angels, but they are written with just as much humanity as the Germans. The young working class pilot of a Lancaster bomber, describing himself as the oldest member of his crew, says plainly but with humour, ‘I’m 24. They call me Granddad’. The survival rate for such crews was far from high. 

Till 27 August 2006.