Photo: Jean Mohr
“Impossible now to think of train travel without a kind of tenderness - as if that is what love is: arrival after arrival.”
Vanishing Points is a unique collaboration between Anne Michaels and John Berger.
A profound meditation, intimate and committed, Railtracks moves from the industrial to the metaphysical, from the tectonic shifts of globalization to the interior pulses of memory, and from the present to a past that still exists in vivid, essential traces.
Directed by Simon McBurney with Complicite and presented in the historic German Gymnasium in King's Cross, this work for theatre was published as Railtracks in the UK by Go Together Press in 2011, and in the US by Counterpoint Press in 2013.
Praise for Vanishing Points / Railtracks:
"Both Michaels and Berger expertly understand the limits of the metaphor, and the trust of the reader. That trust is never allowed to dip ... It is rare to see such perfection on the page. And it does not matter at all that Railtracks rushes by in only eight-five of them, because it is not a book that is completed at the end; immediately it is a volume that will forever be pressed into the corners of travel cases, pushed into jacket pockets for train journeys; it will be returned to again and again for as long as eyes can see, and when they fail, someone else can read it to me." - Wales Arts Review
"Vanishing Points is a reminder of the role that railways and stations have played in our personal and national history. It reminds, too, of the role they play for the many that still dream of coming here. It thunders with the sound of people on the move; sometimes to a new life and often to oblivion. It brings the dead back to life, and it reminds that we walk on the bones of those who went before us ... [T]here is something undeniably atmospheric and emotionally evocative about the experience. Afterwards, you stride into the night to catch a train with the rail tracks of memory imprinted across your mind." - The Guardian
"Even far away from the tracks themselves, one can still hear the ever present sound of trains and their whistles ... [t]he railway symboliz[ing] separation and return, exile, hope, despair, nostalgia, while railway stations have been places where people linger and dream, where men went off to war, and where lovers could meet in anonymity." - Vertigo
"With photographs by Czech artist Tereza Stehlíková, this sensitively written work, which contains not a word too many, will make you yearn to embark on a long return journey by train." - Hackney Citizen
