Life in the past for a modern audience
July 29, 2010 11:28How do you transport a modern audience to the lives of those who lived generations before? For this short sketch written by Brecht during his exile from Nazi Germany, Matthew Evans, winner of a young director’s award, does it both with subtlety and clumsiness.
After a couple of dissident songs, the show’s clunking preamble involves the audience being led down corridors lined with old shoes and images of huddled Jews in concentration camps.
I am going to assume that the red mist-filled room into which we are guided is not meant to suggest a gas chamber. No one could be that crass. But how this excruciating possibility did not occur to any
of the creative team remains a nagging mystery. Let us, instead, call it a dreamlike portal through which we enter the past.
Composer Manuel Pinheiro’s aural wave whooshes us back in time with sounds from bygone eras. A beam of light snaps onto an old valve radio. And here we are, in pre-war Nazi Germany, where Judith (Kristin Hutchinson) is quietly packing. It is an exquisite transformation.
What follows is not so much the banality of evil as the ordinariness of persecution. Evans delicately creates a sense of uncertainty.
A Jewish woman packs; her gentile husband (Mark Lockyer) pretends to protest while appeasing his wife’s persecutors.
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