Young Vic’s Golem: its status as a cult hit fills me with troubled wonder

The Young Vic produces shows that please many but rarely me. Its big hit of 2014, A Streetcar Named Desire, won virtually every prize going apart from the one it deserved: the year’s deadliest assault on a much-loved classic. The modernised setting offered us a tactless, shirty Blanche DuBois, played by Gillian Anderson as a stupefied boob-job victim searching for a rich jerk to bankrupt.

The Young Vic’s new year programme kicks off with Golem, adapted from Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel about a rabbi who fashions an automated slave from some discarded bits of candle wax. The show is created by a posse of euro-troubadours, with the confusing name 1927, who offer a superb blend of animation, satirical sets and puppet-like humans in comedy costumes. Bam! The visual impact is stunning. The designer has restricted himself to a narrow but vivid palette resembling a ketchup-splattered bumble bee. It’s all violent yellows, toasty browns, suave blacks and hooligan reds.

The optical exhilaration begins to abate as the story opens up. The tone is detached, superior, ironic and rather embittered. The lead character, a spineless moron named Bob, is stuck in a dead-beat back-office job, which goes kaput when a hyper-efficient robot replaces him. Bob and his cheerless chums mooch and slither through an urban landscape tagged with jokes that would struggle to make it into a sixth-form magazine. An osteopath is called Helen Back. An outlet named Lucy Froot sells fruit. A bridal mart carries the subheading ‘Brides: buy, sell, repair’. That pleasantry might have got a laugh in a suffragette sketch before the Great War but its edge has worn off a little in the intervening 101 years.

The characters are all desiccated, stooping whine-a-minute creations with no meaningful relationships and no dramatic goals other than to emphasise how detached they are from all that surrounds them.