| TELLING A TERRIBLE TALE
|
By JOHN NATHAN
|
 |
|
| Ph: Robert Workman |
|
|
In 1941 the Jewish half of the Polish town of Jedwabne was murdered. In 2009 the massacre is central to a huge political row in Britain and a remarkable new play at the National.
What was different, though not unique, about this particular atrocity was that it was not carried out by occupying Germans, but by the Polish neighbours of the Jewish victims. Many were burned to death in a barn.
The row concerns the former Polish MP for Jedwabne, who in 2000 opposed his president’s apology to Jews for the massacre and, despite accusations of anti-Semitism, has since become leader of an important political group in Europe while controversially receiving the backing of Britain’s Conservative Party.
As that increasingly sordid argument rumbles on, the world-premiere production of Our Class by Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobozianek—given a lively and casual English translation by Ryan Craig—serves as a dignified and devastating counterpoint.
Though Jedwabne is never mentioned by name, the play's premise is that many of the town’s Catholic perpetrators and Jewish victims would have shared the same classroom as children.
Slobodzianek has turned to the form used for many a play rooted in the Holocaust—that of testimony. It is never clear in what forum this testimony is told, nor does it matter.
Fast-rising Anglo/Iranian director Bijan Sheibani, who burst onto London’s theatrical landscape with a superb Young Vic production of The Brothers Size, stays true to that paired-down vision. No kitsch recreation of a Polish town here, just a rectangle space around which Slobodzianek’s ten Jewish and Catholic characters patiently wait for their cue.
We first encounter them in school where they play, bicker and cruelly tease, as all children do. They are aware of their Jewish/Catholic differences but there is more that unites than separates. They sing the same nursery rhymes, and bashful boys such as Rysiek, the son of a Catholic builder, make clumsy advances at girls such as Dora, the daughter of a Jewish merchant. But as these children advance into adolescence and adulthood—taking with them the classroom dynamic, its hierarchy and its relationships—they are increasingly buffeted by the forces of nationalism, communism, Nazism and anti-Semitism.
Political context is crucial here. But it is never allowed to distract from Slobodzianek’s central lesson—that it is not politics that kills, but people.
We brace ourselves as the play builds to the terrible event that inspired it—the barn burning. The moment is delicately depicted. As designer Bunny Christie’s ceiling claustrophobically lowers over the acting space, the event is shown through the perspective of just one victim, that of Dora (Sinead Matthews), who holds her baby close as smoke billows around her. “This is life?” she asks.
True, you would have to be a writing dunce to fail to move with such material. But it’s Slobodzianek’s ability to manipulate the role of the audience, not just move it, that suggests a masterly hand.
We are a jury listening to several versions of events. But we are also witnesses to those events, as are the characters who listen to other versions of their own story.
And whereas lesser writers would have ended the play in the unbearably poignant aftermath of the massacre, this one sticks with the story over the decades that followed and explores that rather well-worn question, how survivors cope with the guilt of living. There is just one here, Rachelka (an understated but stand-out performance by Amanda Hale) who stayed alive by living as Catholic Marianna, and for whom life in a residential home with a television and, luxury of luxuries, a bath is her only compensation.
But Slobodzianek is at least equally interested in how perpetrators cope with the guilt of killing, too. You can take or leave the notion that before death they experience a personal reckoning, haunted by their victims. But why not? The idea sits easily in a play where the dead serve as witnesses.
If there is a masterstroke here it is that this play and Sheibani's production avoids that thing that most dramatists so desperately seek—confrontation.
Perpetrators do not deny, victims do not accuse. They all simply tell their story as best they can. And in that shared act of at times harrowing storytelling, it not only feels as if Slobodzienek has got closer to the truth, but has offered the faintest chance of hope.
|
