Georg Büchner must have been something of  a prodigy. He died at the age of 23 and wrote his play Danton’s Death at the age of 21 in 1834 while hiding from the police for revolutionary activity.  A new version by Howard Brenton is running at London’s Olivier Theatre until October 14

It has more or less stood the test of time. To the modern hear much of the dialogue has a declamatory tone. This may have been the way the Jacobins spoke to each other or it may have been the preferred conversational style of Büchner’s comrades. Most probably it was Büchner’s way of trying to convey the historical weight of the themes that are explored. Much of the same ground is covered in Andrzej Wajda‘s superb film Danton in which he used this period of the French Revolution as an analogy for Stalinism. Anyone who has seen the film before seeing the play can’t help but make comparisons between the two. Anything with Gerard Depardieu is going to have a little bit of scenery chewing but Wajda’s account of the period leading up to Danton’s execution is much more oppressive and intimate than the theatre piece.

Both Büchner and Wajda are much more favourably disposed to Danton than Robespierre (pictured). He is the moderate face of the revolution who, although responsible for executing the king, wanted to call a stop to the Terror. He freely admits to being a libertine who has grown tired of politics and revolution. Büchner gives him some good lines with which to ridicule Robespierre’s puritanical incorruptibility and some even stronger lines with which to question the Revolution’s use of terror against its enemies. If I’d had a pen on me I might even have written some of them down.

Poor old Saint-Just is the real villain of the piece. In Büchner’s telling he is the dirty practical revolutionary politician who is willing to break the rules to get his way and throughout the narrative is pushing the unworldly Robespierre on to increasingly brutal action. This has something of the air of caricature and reduced the political debate over how to defend and consolidate the revolution to the machinations of a couple of nasty men.

The final scene was superbly staged. Take my advice and, should you ever have to choose your own method of execution, plump for the guillotine. If it works the way it did in the theatre you won’t feel a thing. Goodness only knows how the actors managed to get their heads back on in time for the curtain call.

Inevitably the omnipresent Žižek put in an appearance. The theatre’s bookshop was selling his anthology of speeches from the period Virtue and Terror and dipping into it you can’t help but have a renewed admiration for the Jacobin achievement in overthrowing the old order.

As the recent little debate over the Russian Thermidor on this site showed the question of how a revolution secures itself without degenerating into either a bloodbath or something worse than what existed before is still unanswered. This play, by a near contemporary, was an attempt to address it and for £10 a ticket is stimulation at a bargain price.