The Land of the Living review – Juliet Stevenson’s gripping performance elevates an imperfect WWII drama

History, like memory, is slippery. David Lan’s The Land of the Living – directed with typically restless energy by Oscar-nominated director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot; The Hours; The Reader) – unspools across time and place, showing us both the unbearable weight of the decisions made in the rubble of post-war Europe and the echoes of those decisions decades later. It is an imperfect, but urgent new play.

Germany, 1945: Ruth (Juliet Stevenson) is a 20-year-old UN relief worker tasked with reuniting children snatched from Eastern Europe by the Nazis with their families. She meets 10-year-old Thomas, whose situation raises questions that will shape both their lives: should Ruth return him to parents he cannot remember, or leave him with the German family who raised him? Fast forward to London, 1990: Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha) is visiting Ruth and demanding answers. Out of this confrontation, the play blossoms into something between memory, testimony and confession.

Stevenson is intoxicating. She plays the older version of Ruth with a brittle, deflective humour. Her eyes, glassy and searching, do the heavy lifting. When the charm drops and she lets herself be swallowed by her own memories, Stevenson is electric. The distinction between young Ruth and older Ruth could have been drawn more starkly, but that's only a minor quibble.

Wlaschiha's Thomas, by contrast, feels less fully realised in both script and performance. The character rages convincingly, and his piano interludes are dazzling, but too often he is reduced to a sounding board for Ruth’s recollections. The imbalance is partly structural: Lan’s script uses Thomas less as a character than as a vessel for questions about the ownership of trauma and the unreliable nature of memory. Still, the effect is that of a lopsided duel, one side burning vividly, the other failing to catch light.

If the performances sometimes feel uneven, the production around them is anything but: Miriam Buether’s design transforms the Dorfman into a restless landscape of doors, trapdoors and painfully empty corridors. The supporting ensemble is likewise superb, near-unrecognisable as they slip from role to role. Anchored by Gareth Fry’s sound design and Paul Englishby’s stirring score, the staging has a propulsive, tumbling energy.

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Lan’s themes are powerful: the commodification of childhood; the flippancy with which societies treat their most vulnerable; the plight of displaced minors. These issues feel as pressing now as they did in the ruined landscapes of 1945 – yet for all its urgency, The Land of the Living occasionally loses its grip. Too many pivotal moments are hurried past in favour of stylised sequences. And at over two and a half hours, the play cries out for tightening. The final act, which promises inner reckoning, settles instead for a somewhat unsatisfying fade.

Still, there are passages of real beauty. Lan threads dry British humour through the darkness and for every moment that veers towards post-war heartwarming cliché, there are others that bristle with raw truth.

The Land of the Living is sprawling, uneven, and occasionally frustrating. But it is also alive, committed, filled with craft and conviction. If anything, it is a reminder that Stevenson remains one of our most compelling stage presences.

‘The Land of the Living’ is on at The National Theatre until 1 November; tickets here