Mad Forest

Caryl Churchill's audacious portrait of a Romanian revolution hasn't dated since it opened in 1990, months after the execution of Ceausescu. But so perfectly anchored is it in the events of 1989 that it's hard to feel its relevance in this painstakingly period, JMK Award-winning production from young director Caroline Steinbeis.A fragmented but naturalistic tale of life under Ceausescu, where youth and love tug at the tentative equilibrium of two families surviving a repressive regime, is expertly interwoven with verbatim accounts of the revolution.

When the families return in the post-communist era, vampires and angels stalk an increasingly surrealist stage. Language deteriorates, racism, nostalgia and confusion disrupt the narrative, and heroism and happy endings sink dizzingly from view. It's a canny calling card for Steinbeis, who handles her large and largely brilliant cast, the sprawling story and this rainbow display of dramatic syles with assurance. Against Max Jones's tattered and torn prefab set, the splinters of Romanian stories have a serrated potency. But the sense of desperate urgency with which Churchill penned her play doesn't arrive in this slightly perfunctory and occasionally forced revival.