The notion that first responders and journalists run towards danger, while everyone else runs away, appears not to have been understood by the Southwark News. Not that there is any appreciable danger to turning up to Theatre503 – Battersea’s venerable fringe playhouse, where Beth Paterson’s one-woman show NIUSIA is currently running. Yet because the show, which won a Fringe First in Edinburgh last year, can be described as Jewish, the local paper refused to cover it.
“Anything Jewish right now is a red flag with all the attacks on them and their synagogues,” was the paper’s initial response to an invitation to review Paterson’s show, although they have now agreed to risk life and limb and attend a performance.
There have been complaints, not least by the show’s publicists and Paterson herself. But perhaps we should be grateful that the Southwark News employee who wrote that sentence was so transparent. Had the paper’s refusal been couched with the usual polite wording, we would never have known the crass cowardice that lay behind the decision. It also illustrates just how prejudice works, in its most inert and unthinking form.
Though the writer will not see themselves in this way, they are a perfect example of the “do nothing” crowd who, as the saying goes, are all that evil needs to triumph. In this case, all that was needed was to decide not to review a little show at a fringe theatre specifically because of its Jewish content, with the result that a community under threat of terrorism and violence will be a little more marginalised; a little less part of wider society; a little easier to attack.
It doesn’t matter that, for a good part of her life, Paterson barely thought of herself as Jewish. She was 14 when her grandmother Niusia died at the age of 86. Until then, she grew up thinking of her Nanna in less than glowing terms, she tells us, while standing among a simple set, comprised mainly of books.
“She was a bitch,” Paterson says shockingly. The memories that dominate Paterson’s childhood are of a ruthless, bitter woman, who got her way with micro-aggressions and emotional blackmail – sometimes even citing her status as a Holocaust survivor and the six million as a way of destroying any opposition to her objective.
When it came to business, however, this determination to get what she wanted resulted in a series of successful ventures in Melbourne, Paterson’s home town.
When Paterson decided to learn more about her grandmother she interviewed her mother Suzie, a psychologist. Clips of the recordings are scattered throughout the show, and help paint a much rounder portrait of Niusia than the one Paterson grew up with.
One of the more entertaining tales is about a woman who returned a dress she’d bought from Niusia’s shop because she wore it to a Dame Edna Everage show only to find, to her horror, that Dame Edna was wearing the same dress. Niusa said she would have made a virtue of the coincidence by standing up, turning to the audience, and shouting: “Hello Possums”.
But embarrassment is not an issue for someone who survived Auschwitz because she was selected to work for Josef Mengele as a nurse, and smuggled drugs to her fellow prisoners by hiding medicines in her vagina.
Once you know this fact, Paterson’s own story of Jewish identity increasingly feels as if we’re listening to the wrong story. Which is not say her journey into Jewishness is not worth telling – but it is Niusia we want to know more about. To that end, the hour-long piece would have benefited hugely from photographs of Paterson’s grandmother, and some visual sense of the world she was born into and ended up in.
Still, the picture we get is of a tough, fearless woman who did not suffer fools. I wonder what she would have said to the Southwark News.
NIUSIA is at Theatre503, London until May 23
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