Trains of thought

At the back of King's Cross station stands the remains of the German Gym - a purpose-built gymnasium constructed for German immigrants in 1861 and the site of Britain's first ever gym club. Along with many other old buildings with stories to tell, the gym is now part of the mass building site that constitutes the Channel Tunnel development at King's Cross.

For three nights this week, however, it's also the backdrop for Vanishing Points: a unique theatre piece by the writer John Berger and Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels. It's inspired by the history of King's Cross as a place of arrivals and departures and conceived in response to the enormous upheaval facing the area as the bulldozers change it forever.

'Lenin and Trotsky both lived in King's Cross,' says Simon McBurney, artistic director of Complicite. A long-time collaborator and friend of John Berger, he is directing Vanishing Points as part of a month-long celebration of Berger's work. 'Boudicca passed through here and it's rumoured she is buried under Platform 8.

The station sits on the site of a massive graveyard and the area is full of eccentric historical detail and tales of migration. Vanishing Points is a meditation on the nature of place but it is also about the idea of journeys that are very much part of all railways.'

King's Cross has always been a site of change - McBurney makes reference to the 19th-century slum clearances in which uprooted people were placed in the same houses as the workers who were demolishing their homes. But the merciless scope of this latest transformation is curiously stimulating.

Those early railway lines that drove through the graveyard and the bodies that had to be exhumed are a metaphor for the sheer personal wreckage of instigating a project like this,' McBurney says. 'Vanishing Points is not a lecture, nor is it a definitive account, nor is it a purely angry political response. It's a highly personal depiction of fragments and moments of meditation retrieved from the wreckage of history.

It's about two writers from different countries walking round a ruin next to a railway station and thinking about the nature of separation and exile. It's about Anne's father, a Jewish immigrant, arriving at Union Station in Toronto. And it's about train journeys Berger took as a young boy across Europe.'

McBurney has worked with Berger many times: he adapted Berger's The Three Lives Of Lucie Cabrol; his radio adaptation of To The Wedding was nominated for the Prix Italia; and he confides in Berger at length about his own work. Berger sent McBurney a piece he had written on Trafalgar Square when McBurney was working with the Pet Shop Boys. And Vanishing Points's preoccupation with the function of memory touches on a preoccupation of McBurney's and a defining theme of Complicite's 1999 production Mnemonic.

'We have the illusion that our memories are stored in our brains and all we have to do is retrieve them, whereas our brains are a basket of fragments and, each time we remember something, we rearrange the fragments of that memory,' McBurney says.

'Vanishing Points is a modest piece,' he continues. 'But what John and Anne have written is very touching. It's like a junction on a railway; Anne and John have got off in order to get on a train going somewhere else but, for the moment, that is where they are.'