Judgment Day: 4 stars from Music OMH

Music OMH awarded 4 stars.

Director James Macdonald has created a tremendous ensemble production with a strong community feel, in which the mundane everyday routine of waiting on a station platform gives way to extraordinary tragedy, while gossip becomes slander and voyeurs turn into a lynch-mob. Miriam Buether’s ingeniously flexible design features a moving platform which is used for the different town locations of train station, inn, pharmacy and railway viaduct, while also suggesting shifting perspectives of the people involved. The passing trains are atmospherically evoked by steam, as well as the lighting of Neil Austin and sound of Christopher Shutt, so that we almost feel the locomotive blast ourselves.

Leading a strong cast, Joseph Millson excels as the normally reliable Hudetz who goes seriously off the rails: at first polite and personable, his repressed guilt drives him to the edge of sanity, as he hopes for salvation from a ‘higher judgment’.