In her latest play writer/director Julia Pascal highlights a little-known yet harrowing period in the life of one of the most acclaimed intellectuals of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt.
In May 1940, the political and totalitarianism theorist was arrested in France with two other German-Jewish women, the painter Charlotte Salomon and Eva Daube, a young communist. Along with thousands of other Austrian and German refugees deemed “undesirable” by the state, they were sent to a desperately inhospitable internment camp in Gurs near the Spanish border. The detainees even included some Nazis, this being prior to the French-German armistice.
Pascal’s play with music, which is performed with intensity by an all-female six-strong cast, unflinchingly conveys the inhumane conditions in which as many as 60 detainees were crammed into each uninsulated, windowless and even bed-less wooden hut.
Pascal’s production deploys an array of theatrical devices to convey life – or more accurately existence and death - in the camp. One is an arresting score by composer/performer Anja Fahlenkamp whose choral music is rooted in the fear, anxiety and sheer incredulity of the women who have been dumped like neglected farm animals into camp.
Typically for Pascal, author of the Holocaust Trilogy plays, the agony and humiliation of dysentery is tackled head on. Use of buckets leaves little to the imagination.
With the cast declaring each forthcoming scene like an announcer at a train station this intimate show in the venue’s studio space has the radical feel of a production by the German anti-fascist dramatist Brecht whose intention was to make the audience think about a play’s themes and issues rather than settle into an entertainment.
Yet dramatically Pascal’s work is most potent when embracing good old-fashioned realism. The scene in which an inmate is tried for stealing another’s bread is particularly powerful. Here the highly educated Arendt, superbly played by a steely Mai Weisz, serves as an impromptu judge. The summing up, in which Weisz’s watchful Arendt searingly lays out how the theft of a piece of bread dismantles the life of its owner, reveals the laser focus of Arendt’s mind.
However, despite all that is revealed here, the evening finishes with a sense of unfinished business when it comes to the lives of its two most famous characters. Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger is glanced at, and that Salomon (Anna Eckhard) was abused by her grandfather and killed him while hiding from the Nazis is surely worth more stage time than it is given.
The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940
Arcola
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