THE act of creating theatre becomes deeply sinister in this striking play, by the Spanish writer Juan Mayorga, based on actual events at Theresienstadt, Hitler’s model internment camp in the Czech Republic.
It begins with a former Red Cross representative’s soft-voiced description of his 1942 visit to a camp near Berlin. But instead of encountering the horrors of Dachau or Buchenwald, he finds himself touring a bizarre model village under the guidance of the camp’s Spinoza-quoting German Commandant and Jewish mayor. Children play picturesquely, courting couples plan their future and an elderly man sells bright balloons. None of it seems real — and, gradually, it emerges that the whole thing is a grotesque and elaborate PR exercise, designed to conceal the true extent of the German atrocities of the Holocaust from European eyes.
As the scenes detailed by the Red Cross man are re- enacted, the illusion begins to disintegrate. Actors forget their lines; one woman even attempts to escape, only to be smoothly and chillingly replaced. Finally, in the play’s concluding section, we see how the so-called mayor, Gottfried, was reprieved from the gas chambers to assist the Commandant in designing and executing the entire sickening deception. And we realise that the drama can only end, for him and for all the other “actors”, in a journey across the Himmelweg, or “way to heaven” — a path leading to a forbidding hangar euphemistically termed the infirmary.
Mayorga’s play, in David Johnston’s lucid translation, emphasises starkly the propensity of human beings to blind themselves to the fate of their fellow creatures. Like the central character in C.P. Taylor’s Good, the Red Cross representative is an ordinary, educated man who knows he is part of something obscene; like him, he chooses to do nothing.
And Ramin Gray’s uncompromisingly austere promenade production has an inescapable immediacy that makes us feel culpable.
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With its repetitions of action and dialogue and its lengthy monologues, the play makes demanding, and not always absorbing viewing, and at times you feel it would have worked just as well on the radio. But then you would miss the nuances of the fine performances — particularly from Dominic Rowan as the ostentatiously cultured Commandant, relishing his role in the theatrical proceedings with ridiculous pomposity, and Richard Katz as Gottfried, forced, as casting director, to decide who will play a part and who will be sent to die. Altogether, an uneven but compellingly uncomfortable experience.
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