UK Theatre Network

Two years ago audiences were raving about Neil Bartlett’s Manchester International Festival production of The Pianist, which was originally staged in the highly unconventional setting of a loft above the Museum of Science and Industry.  Now there’s another chance to see it with the original cast in the Royal Exchange main house.

The piece is based on the wartime memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a concert pianist who survived the horrors of Warsaw during World War II – Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film from 2003 was based on the same material. 

This version of the story opens with Warsaw’s Jewish population already incarcerated in the ghetto - overcrowded, starving, infested with vermin and lice, when typhus inevitably breaks out there is nowhere to bury the dead, and rotting bodies lie stripped naked on the streets.  Wladyslaw is now reduced to playing the piano in bars, but eventually his family is summoned for transportation from the ghetto to some unknown destination far away.  As the disinfected cattle trucks draw into the station Wladyslaw seizes his chance to flee, and then spends lonely years hiding in the ruins of what had recently been one of Europe’s wealthiest cities, trying to elude starvation, cold and the Nazis.

The auditorium is stark – merely a wooden floor, a grand piano, a chair, and two performers: actor Peter Guinness, who narrates, and pianist Mikhail Rudy, who punctuates the narrative with music by Chopin and Szpilman himself.  Peter Guinness, with a piercing gaze that takes in the whole audience from the front stalls to the back of the gods, prowls endlessly around the piano as he repeats his tale with the simplicity of a Greek messenger.  It’s an incredibly stripped-down form of story-telling, and the few moments of drama are all the more effective for their rarity.  At the keyboard Mikhail Rudy does far more than provide a pretty background accompaniment – sometimes his playing pushes the difficult emotions even further, sometimes music is the only thing which can resolve and diffuse the tension.  The frisson when Guinness and Rudy interact is thrilling. 

Despite the ostensible minimalism of the design and staging, Chris Davey’s wonderful lighting creates a tangible sense of atmosphere, location, season and mood.

The Royal Exchange main house has never felt so intimate, and The Pianist reveals that it’s not just a wonderful theatre space but also a brilliant venue for chamber music.

The Pianist is on until Saturday 27 June 2009

Prices: £8.50-£27.00

Evenings: Mon-Sat @ 8pm (excluding Wed 24)

Matinees: Wed 24 @ 2.30pm

Box Office: 0161 833 9833

www.royalexchange.co.uk