In the swill of my knowledge about Nazi Germany’s depravity I hadn’t known, or remembered, that the policy of furthering the master race – a phrase which is impossible to think of without chuckling ever since Mel Brooks lampooned it in The Producers – included Himmler’s Lebensborn programme which involved stealing “racially pure” children from middle and east European countries under German occupation and installing them with German families.
In this new play based on interviews with the investigative journalist Gitta Sereny and written by the Jewish former artistic director of The Young Vic, David Lan, Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, who once worked for UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, not to be confused with UNRWA). Her post-war job was to help repatriate displaced or orphaned children, and it was while doing this work that she discovered the programme that involved German doctors measuring the noses, heads and other parts of the anatomy of children to discern whether the are “special” or not.
We first encounter Ruth in 1990 in her London flat which has just been stormed by a flustered Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha), who we learn fell under the protection of Ruth as a boy when she discovered him living in a German village. Today Thomas is a renowned concert pianist, a career that Ruth lovingly follows, though she hasn’t seen him for years.
Driven by the sense that a great wrong has informed his life without ever quite understanding what it is, he has arrived hot foot from his latest performance in New York in search of answers.
Stephen Daldry’s characteristically lively production is staged on a long traversing platform which spans much of the theatre and the 45- year gap between Thomas’s visit in 1990 and 1945. Stevenson remarkably plays her character at the ages of 20 and 65.
A play that concentrates the mind on the child victims of war can only be a good thing. But this one takes a long time to answer the mystery it sets us: what is eating Thomas? It also fatally wears its messaging on its sleeve. Any production that has its protagonist declare the phrase “moral responsibility”, as if we needed reminding what motivated them to write the play, has lost its faith in its own story. This one does it twice.
Keats said “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us…”. He’d say the same of plays.
The Land of the Living
National Theatre
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