One of the best things the theatre can do is embody the stories of forgotten lives. In The Forbidden Zone, director Katie Mitchell and playwright Duncan Macmillan achieve this mesmerisingly, desolatingly. Their subjects are women at war. Their worlds are fragmented and unstable. Macmillan’s script has no one strong voice: it is a collage of different texts. Mitchell’s production has no single driving line or mode. It swims between the virtual and the actual, between video and flesh.
During the first world war the German scientist Fritz Haber undertook research that led to the development of poison gas. It would, he thought, provide “a higher form of killing”. His wife, Clara Immerwahr, also a chemist, who had troubled relations with her husband and was fiercely opposed to his military work, shot herself a week after gas was used at Ypres. In 1949, Clara’s grand-daughter, Claire Haber, a scientist in Chicago, swallowed a lethal dose of cyanide. She had just been told that her research into an antidote for the effects of chlorine gas was being set aside. Work on the atomic bomb was to take precedence.
This Schaubühne Berlin production, performed in German with surtitles, interweaves the two women’s histories with words from women writers, among them Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. The title comes from the poetic prose of Mary Borden, whose own life is worth a show. She was a Chicago heiress, a lover of Wyndham Lewis, who paid for and ran a field hospital outside Ypres. The Forbidden Zone is the title of her autobiographical collection of stories.
Working with the video designer Leo Warner, Mitchell’s work is instantly recognisable. Here is treacly slowness, murky lighting, unwavering intensity. These qualities can silt up a play. Not here. They are at one with her subject and only illuminate.
The two suicides are differently dreadful. One is hesitated over, then quickly dispatched, in a beautiful courtyard. The other, carried out in a lavatory, ends with a woman jerking in pain, foaming at the mouth, and eventually cradled – as if in a deposition scene – in the arms of a colleague. Both are seen closeup on screen and on stage, in Lizzie Clachan’s haunting, many-windowed design.
Fading life is captured unforgettably in the opening moments. A soldier is seen on film, standing to attention. A poem by Borden is read aloud. It is about a young man waiting for death while above him the sky “is flapping down in frantic shreds”. He moves slightly; fear grows, and gradually the picture begins to freeze. This is the opposite of watching a slow-motion picture of a bud breaking into flower. A vivid presence is being stilled. The boy turns into an old photograph.
