Guest Post: 'What A Revelation This Has Been': Director Matilda Ziegler On Returning To Ödön von Horváth's JUDGMENT DAY

My daughter, Faye Ziegler and I are mad about this play and have wanted to revive it for years. She recently graduated from Oxford School of Drama, and she’s almost exactly the same age as I was in 1989 when I was in the UK premiere at the same venue playing the same part.

Stephen Daldry asked me to be in it all those years ago, and 11 other actors and I squeezed onto the stage of the Old Red Lion Islington. I was smitten by his incredible imagination, his political mind and most of all his unaffected and unselfconscious (and sometimes wild) ideas. It was magical. I’m energised by reflecting on that time but I feel we urgently need to see this play again now. Faye and I founded Fright Train Company for this particular production, with the aim to continue to produce both new and revivalist writing for theatre and film, bringing together a collective of many creatives: actors, writers, designers, composers, stage managers, artists, directors and photographers.

Judgment Day is our inaugural production, bringing into stark reality how people can fall in line with the system and conveniently forget individual civic responsibility. Set in 1937 Germany, Judgment Day puts us into the heart of a rural community where we observe the finest of men doing his duty amongst a colourful mob. But being human and fallible, he makes a grave mistake.

But is it all his fault? Time fractures and suddenly we are forced to make cosmic choices. It’s a play about civic responsibility, centred in a small community which is factional and sometimes petty, which has developed the perfect hierarchical environment for a new system of autocracy. The village already has powerful figures and some natural outliers too and we watch the mob mentality grow. Fascism is the express train that will soon smash this small society to bits and I love how Ödön von Horváth peers into these characters’ lives just before this cataclysmic event reaches them.

Christopher Hampton talks in his forward to Judgment Day of striking up an old friendship with Ödön von Horváth, and I feel the same connection with Judgment Day, except now I have a deeper appreciation of the play since becoming familiar with Christopher Hampton’s excellent translation. He gives us such vibrant and immediate language to play with, and such economy of intention, that once you take the naturalism out of our modern tendency as actors, you really feel the power of the play. What a revelation this has been. But what also draws me in is the expressionist and cosmic themes which are so artistically liberating, especially for our first production as a collective for Fright Train, as we offer opportunities in all directions to make theatre.

I have been overwhelmed by the level of talent and commitment on this production from day one. I asked a talented bunch of actors to give up their time to get this off the ground. Apart from the wonder of working with my daughter Faye, who is just a brilliant actor, my other daughter Evie Hilyer-Ziegler has joined the company to give us her extraordinary original live score music. It has lifted the production to a different level. Bobbie Wilson has painted incredible original artwork especially for the set. I’ve had generous help from every corner, from free props on loan, superb press and marketing and great design and lighting. This makes it a dream, and added to this I get to direct a huge and fabulous cast, bringing together actors I’ve known for years into a room of talented young newcomers, and watching the sparks fly - in a fun way! 

Judgment Day is at the Old Red Lion Theatre until 10 October