In 1938 Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish refugee, living in exile in Britain, having fled the Nazis, wrote a novel, Beware of Pity which has been adapted for the stage by Complicite’s Simon McBurney and Berlin’s Schaubuhne. The performances quickly sold out at the Barbican.
Anton Hofmiller, in middle-age, remembers when he was a young and impoverished cavalry officer pre –World War 1 and attended a rich landowner’s ball. He was a great success with the ladies and having a great time when he suddenly realized he had not asked his host’s daughter to dance and quickly made amends, only to find, to his great embarrassment, that she was paralyzed. Motivated by pity, Hofmiller befriends her and leads her to believe that he might marry her and her family begins to believe that his love for her might heal her of her disease.
The disabled woman is a shrill, ugly, raging, disturbing presence. Hofmiller should run a mile. Instead he becomes as emotionally paralyzed as she is physically paralyzed.
McBurney and the actors take the audience on an exhausting emotional and psychological ride. The production is staged with his characteristic inventive artifice and the story, vocally and visually, is extremely powerful.