The White Factory - Marylebone Theatre
Sept 20, 2023 18:03:19 GMT
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Post by Steve on Sept 20, 2023 18:03:19 GMT
This is a superb harrowing Holocaust drama.
Some spoilers follow. . .
The Marylebone Theatre is off the beaten track, so I almost gave this a miss, but I'm glad I didn't as it's really powerful.
There are so many brilliant books and documentaries about the Holocaust (Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" comes to mind) that you wonder what on earth a drama could add.
And, to be honest, substantively, probably not much.
But since this is something we should never forget, it's worth having a periodic reminder, and this world premiere production tells the story of the Lodz ghetto in striking and unforgettable ways.
The writer and director are Russian dissidents, with the writer, Dmitry Glukhovsky, sentenced last month, in absentia, to 8 years in prison in Russia for "spreading false information" about the Russian war in Ukraine.
Although this drama isn't about Russia, it strikes me that these two know a thing or two about what happens to a country that's slowly boiled into totalitarian hell, how imperceptibly but inevitably everything goes bad.
This story is about how the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto in Poland were boiled slowly by the Nazis, like frogs, never realising the true horror of what was happening until it was too late.
It's also about what it might take to survive such horrors, and unsurprisingly, the answer is horrible.
The production reminded me a little bit of Ivo Van Hove's style, in that actors, playing Nazis, carry cameras to record their victims, with close-up camera images broadcast on the back wall, conveying a sense of intimacy and immediacy. But this goes beyond that, as the images are in stark black and white, and create a time travel bridge between the actors we are watching in the foreground, and the images of them in the background that appear exactly as the images in the aforementioned documentary records of the time do.
There is something of the Katie Mitchell in the way green screen is used to allow actors to integrate themselves live into pre-recorded cinematic images. But this goes beyond that, utilising the technique to tell the stories we tell ourselves, to sustain and protect us, such as the story of the Golem, which horror might beat back even greater horrors that threaten us. The production is merciless, and useful, in showing us how the stories we tell ourselves might or might not prove to ultimately be ineffectual.
The actors engage in a purifying hand washing ritual, to the side, when they enter the stage, at the beginning and after the interval. There is a bravery and a beauty to this, but also an element of futile helplessness in the gesture in the face of an unimaginable horror.
And there is also something of the Lady Macbeth about the gesture, in that to survive horrors, one might have to do things that engender guilt to the point of madness, and washing one's hands may not be enough to remove the stain.
As the lead character, Mark Quartley plays Yosef Kaufman, whose ability to speak German may or may not offer him some protection against the Nazis. I panicked when I saw he had two children, played by child actors, as I recalled that Quartley also had such children when he appeared in Jamie Lloyd's "Macbeth," playing Malcolm, a decade ago, and I remembered what happened there.
Kaufman's wife is played by a heartbreakingly decent Pearl Chanda, and her father is played by a tough but trusting Adrian Schiller. This family unit of five is at the heart of the drama, and they are all captivating, with Quartley really rising to the occasion as the man with only bad choices, his determination to do good, and to resist, constantly at war with the compromises he may have to make to protect his family.
The principal villain is James Garnon's SS officer, Wilhelm Koppe, and Garnon, always so good at being bad, does some of his best work as the monster in charge.
Adrian Schiller actually has two roles, and it is as the second, the most senior Jewish man in charge of the Lodz Ghetto, that he really commands, as a man coerced into making (Sophie's type) choices, Catch-22 situations that Schiller really brings alive, in much the same way he illuminated the conflicted heart of the Reverend John Hale in the Old Vic's "The Crucible" a decade ago.
Anyway, this is a hard watch, with unpleasant things to say about unpleasant things. It is a worthwhile watch. It is unforgettable, as it should be.
5 stars from me.
Some spoilers follow. . .
The Marylebone Theatre is off the beaten track, so I almost gave this a miss, but I'm glad I didn't as it's really powerful.
There are so many brilliant books and documentaries about the Holocaust (Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" comes to mind) that you wonder what on earth a drama could add.
And, to be honest, substantively, probably not much.
But since this is something we should never forget, it's worth having a periodic reminder, and this world premiere production tells the story of the Lodz ghetto in striking and unforgettable ways.
The writer and director are Russian dissidents, with the writer, Dmitry Glukhovsky, sentenced last month, in absentia, to 8 years in prison in Russia for "spreading false information" about the Russian war in Ukraine.
Although this drama isn't about Russia, it strikes me that these two know a thing or two about what happens to a country that's slowly boiled into totalitarian hell, how imperceptibly but inevitably everything goes bad.
This story is about how the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto in Poland were boiled slowly by the Nazis, like frogs, never realising the true horror of what was happening until it was too late.
It's also about what it might take to survive such horrors, and unsurprisingly, the answer is horrible.
The production reminded me a little bit of Ivo Van Hove's style, in that actors, playing Nazis, carry cameras to record their victims, with close-up camera images broadcast on the back wall, conveying a sense of intimacy and immediacy. But this goes beyond that, as the images are in stark black and white, and create a time travel bridge between the actors we are watching in the foreground, and the images of them in the background that appear exactly as the images in the aforementioned documentary records of the time do.
There is something of the Katie Mitchell in the way green screen is used to allow actors to integrate themselves live into pre-recorded cinematic images. But this goes beyond that, utilising the technique to tell the stories we tell ourselves, to sustain and protect us, such as the story of the Golem, which horror might beat back even greater horrors that threaten us. The production is merciless, and useful, in showing us how the stories we tell ourselves might or might not prove to ultimately be ineffectual.
The actors engage in a purifying hand washing ritual, to the side, when they enter the stage, at the beginning and after the interval. There is a bravery and a beauty to this, but also an element of futile helplessness in the gesture in the face of an unimaginable horror.
And there is also something of the Lady Macbeth about the gesture, in that to survive horrors, one might have to do things that engender guilt to the point of madness, and washing one's hands may not be enough to remove the stain.
As the lead character, Mark Quartley plays Yosef Kaufman, whose ability to speak German may or may not offer him some protection against the Nazis. I panicked when I saw he had two children, played by child actors, as I recalled that Quartley also had such children when he appeared in Jamie Lloyd's "Macbeth," playing Malcolm, a decade ago, and I remembered what happened there.
Kaufman's wife is played by a heartbreakingly decent Pearl Chanda, and her father is played by a tough but trusting Adrian Schiller. This family unit of five is at the heart of the drama, and they are all captivating, with Quartley really rising to the occasion as the man with only bad choices, his determination to do good, and to resist, constantly at war with the compromises he may have to make to protect his family.
The principal villain is James Garnon's SS officer, Wilhelm Koppe, and Garnon, always so good at being bad, does some of his best work as the monster in charge.
Adrian Schiller actually has two roles, and it is as the second, the most senior Jewish man in charge of the Lodz Ghetto, that he really commands, as a man coerced into making (Sophie's type) choices, Catch-22 situations that Schiller really brings alive, in much the same way he illuminated the conflicted heart of the Reverend John Hale in the Old Vic's "The Crucible" a decade ago.
Anyway, this is a hard watch, with unpleasant things to say about unpleasant things. It is a worthwhile watch. It is unforgettable, as it should be.
5 stars from me.
