Changes review – secrets, blackmail and lightning fast role-juggling

The Guardian

08-06-2025

A day in the life of a couple plays out from breakfast to dinner. She is a self-composed politician, he is a burnt-out lawyer turned anxious school teacher. They have been married for 20 years and we meet them in the morning discussing toast, problem students and political campaigns before they set off into their working day.
It is ordinary life, given an extraordinary theatrical twist in its performance as it's two agile actors play every character that the central couple meets as well as Nina (Anna Schudt), and Mark (Jörg Hartmann) themselves.
German director Thomas Ostermeier recently directed another Nina in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, at the Barbican, in London. This play was, in fact, staged in Berlin in 2024 but now makes its Italian premiere at the Venice Biennale Teatro, and the Nina here is given a moral dilemma over a shelter for abused women when she is blackmailed by a constituent.
Secrets between the couple are revealed as well as prickly encounters with colleagues and work tensions. The actors are fast and adept in their switches between 23 characters, including schoolchildren, hairdressers (both Hartmann, the latter very entertaining), overbearing bosses (Schudt, the same). The most outrageous switch comes when Nina meets her elderly father at the zoo for lunch and Hartmann goes from playing the zoo's resident elephant to a chimpanzee.
The lightning fast or outre characterisations are highly virtuoso but some feel like diversions in Maja Zade's script, played for laughs, and there to showcase the actors' talents.
There are intrigues, such as a secret drink habit and child loss as well as the plot line of blackmail. But the comic delight to some of the actors' role juggling (especially the elephant and hairdresser scenes) introduces a tone of play and levity that sits at odds with these serious themes.
Muted music comes on at odd moments, in the middle of a scene sometimes, low in volume and wafting on and off as if by accident. Magda Willi's set design works better, part realist but gestural too with a clothes rail at one side to aid speedy costume changes and screens that light up to show the movement of the day through street scenes.
The title of the play evidently refers to the changes that this couple are trying to make in their lives, and in the world. But it is the actors' accomplished changes that become the central drama here.
Until 8 June as part of the Biennale Teatro 2025. Arifa Akbar's trip was provided by Venice Biennale