In Conor McPherson’s first play since the Bob Dylan-laced The Girl from the North Country, pianist and musicologist Wiktor (Luke Thallon) meets Zula (Anya Chalotra) while touring postwar Poland collecting folk music for a state-sponsored show. These songs tend to concern either love or the devil, which rather sets the tone for this tale of amour fou. Zula, who is not the simple mountain girl she claims to be, is enjoined to spy on her new beau by apparatchiks; Wiktor harbours a devastating secret that explains his walled-in emotions. Their first duet even broaches the topic of deceit: “You may say I don’t lie / But I do.”
Over the next few decades, their paths crisscross in Europe and the eastern bloc, their passion persisting as it is bent out of shape by guilt, jealousy and political upheaval. Rubble, jagged wood and bullet-scarred brick is always visible on Jon Bausor’s set even when the stage is transformed by Paule Constable’s crisp lighting design into a recording studio or bebop club. This is a love in disrepair before it has really begun.
Zula teases Wiktor for limiting himself to arrangements rather than original compositions, what she calls “going over old ground for new potatoes”. In adapting Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film, McPherson has harvested a nourishing if carb-heavy crop. The music, too, is repurposed, whether Polish and Lemko folk or a smattering of Elvis Costello numbers, including the ominous I Want You. The score never overwhelms the action (this is no musical), but nor does it quite invoke Zula’s passion for song.
Pacing is also a problem for director Rupert Goold. Pawlikowski’s film concertinaed more than 20 years into an elliptical 88 minutes, so it is perhaps inevitable that the material, necessarily lugubrious in nature, feels unhappily protracted at times.
Cast members stick pleasingly to their assorted British dialects, Death of Stalin-style; the tour manager Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey), for instance, comes across as a Del Boy-esque wheeler-dealer. Chalotra, a dead ringer for Penélope Cruz in looks and volatility, explores fearlessly the depths of Zula’s pain. The bookishly handsome Thallon captures the haunted aspect of a man fleeing his own propensity for cruelty, and waging war on himself.
• At the Almeida, London, until 27 January
