This is one of the few pieces in director Thom Southerland’s production which Szpilman did not write, a crucial point about this show which we will come to later.
Southerland’s adaptation also features the moment in which Szpilman and his family, along with countless other kettled Jews from Warsaw’s ghetto, are herded to a Treblinka-bound cattle carriage only for Szpilman to be recognised at the last second and pulled aside by a Jewish ghetto policeman.
As he struggles against the policeman’s grip and the tide of the crowd, Szpilman sees his family board the carriage. His father Samuel is looking around for his son while attempting to stick with the rest of the family; Szpilman’s pianist mother Estera, his poet brother Henryk and his sisters Regina, a musically talented lawyer and Halina, also a fine pianist. It was the last time he saw them.
“He was saved because people recognised him,” Southerland tells me on the phone a couple of days after the show’s first preview in Southampton. “People knew who he was. He was [like] a film star.”
But it was not just the piano-playing that had made Szpilman famous. Nor was it his regular radio gig or that he accompanied concert soloists including the world famous Jewish violinist Bronislav Gimpel. It was his work as a prolific composer that made Szpilman so popular. It is this part of Szpilman’s life that the show recognises in a way that Polanski’s film and a 2023 New York adaptation of the memoir never achieved.
“I cannot understand how you tell his story without his music. His music and his story are for me part of the same thing,” says Southerland, a former artistic director of Mayflower Theatre, in Southampton, where the show was honed before its London opening.
As well as classical compositions there were hundreds of songs, many with lyrics written by Szpilman’s brother Henryk, though the lyrics have largely been lost.
“There were love songs, songs for musicals, songs for everyday written the radio. My father wrote some 1,000 songs,” Szpilman’s son Andrzej tells me when we meet in a Southampton cafe the morning after the first preview of the new show.
Andrzej has travelled from his home in the Italian region of Switzerland and at 70 looks more powerfully built than images of his father suggest, and certainly more than Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning depiction of him in the film.
“I could never tell from where this delicate man took the superhuman strength to overcome such terrible events,” writes Andrzej in the forward to his father’s best-selling memoir.
You get the impression he will not hesitate to offer criticism of the show if he sees fit, despite being an essential part of it.
“I am not the same as the director or the producer,” he says frankly. Yet he is pleased with how it is developing. This is a relief, not least because we are about to be joined by Daniel Krikler who plays the title role, Andrzej’s father.
Andrzej’s devotion to his father’s memory and legacy was ignited when at the age of 13 he found Szpilman’s memoir in the corner of his parents’ bookshelf. It was the version published in 1946 as Smierc Miasta (Death of a City) which was soon banned by the communist authorities. The work revealed why Andrzej’s father rarely spoke of his family and why Andrzej had no grandparents, aunts or uncles on his father’s side.
Daniel Krikler and (right) Andrzej Szpilman[Missing Credit]
In adulthood Andrzej, who became a dentist and an accomplished musician, has served as both curator and gatekeeper of his father’s archive legacy which is why according to a source he pulled the plug on the 2023 New York production.
It wasn’t that the production was bad, it was just that, like Southerland, Andrzej desperately wanted a stage show that incorporated Szpilman’s music. This one, with musical arrangements by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s longtime collaborator Simon Lee, seems to be passing muster for him.
“I sent 300 songs to Simon,” says Andrzej. “He and Thom have very brilliantly integrated about 20 of them into the story.”
From the preview performance it seems that where the music was originally uplifting or written as a love song it now conveys a fathom-deep sense of loss as Szpilman’s life contracts under persecution.
“The songs work differently,” agrees Andrzej. “But that’s OK.”
Nearly 25 years after Polanski’s film, his motivation for continuing to tell his father’s story has not changed or diminished.
“Why it is so important for me? Because what the Germans did was not only kill six million Jews. They killed photographs, they killed documents, they killed everything. Thousands of artists killed, these millions of songs, of music [including by] my father who lost a violin concerto. Eighty years later we still don’t know what kind of diamonds we have there. Nobody knows, nobody remembers, nobody is caring for them like me.”
With that mission statement hanging in the air Krikler carries his folding bicycle over to our table and sits down. After last night’s performance he has been given half an hour’s leave from rehearsal. “We are doing some big cuts. We have to condense,” he says, removing his helmet.
For Andrzej, watching actors represent his father and grandparents on screen or stage is nothing new.
“I knew what was waiting for me,” he says of last night’s performance. But he well remembers the shock of watching Polanski’s film for the first time and seeing family who he had hitherto only ever imagined.
“When I saw the movie I had no place for my imagination. Suddenly I was there with my family in their home. It was surreal.”
Today it is the actor who is having to make the adjustment.
“I obviously care deeply about what Andrzrej thinks and feels. It’s frightening and scary to know that the child of the person whose story you’re telling is watching. But I kind of know it’s beyond my control. I do my best and pray that it is representative,” says Krikler with a well-founded confidence in his abilities. Talent that worked well for him when he played Perchik in the acclaimed Regent’s Park Open Air theatre production of Fiddler on the Roof and Peter Pan for the RSC.
Any potential imposter syndrome felt by Krikler should also be expunged by the knowledge that his family also has Holocaust survivors, and those who did not survive. His Polish grandfather came to the UK via the Kindertransport. His maternal grandmother who is still alive survived the camps but her mother and sister were murdered at Auschwitz.
“I do have trepidation when a production is Holocaust related,” says Krikler who wears a chunky Magen David. “It’s a thing I’m getting paid to do but it’s also my family’s history of being persecuted and murdered,” adds the Birmingham-born, Coventry-raised actor. “But when I stop feeling those sort of murky emotions, it’s probably the time to stop doing those sort of shows.”
It must help that Krikler has Andrzej’s stamp of approval. At this stage of the show’s development there is still some uncertainty about how to define the production. Is it a play with music? The marketing strategy seems reluctant to declare the show a musical.
“It is a musical!” declares Andrzej unequivocally. “Some people say a play with music. No, this is a music with play,” he adds giving the table a passionate thump. “There is music from the beginning to the end,” he adds, a sentence that could easily be applied to the life of Wladyslaw Szpilman.
The Pianist is at Park Theatre from October 15 to November 28
parktheatre.co.uk/events/the-pianist/
