| Well meaning but fundamentally misguided |
At Theatr Clwyd |
| Clwyd Theatr Cymru- Memory , Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff , December 9, 2006 |
Staging drama about the Holocaust is notoriously problematic however after over fifty years of practice there is a vast store of learnt wisdom, and methodologies to draw upon. The creators of “Memory” seem to have ignored all of them. What we are offered is the, rather tokenistic, distancing mechanism of having us watch a rehearsal of a play about the Holocaust, interrupted with jokes about actors vanity, fickle mindedness and self absorbed materialism, which peter out fairly soon. Even the actors “I’m worried about the rewrites” lines to the rather gnomic figure of the writer/director are answered with “ It happened, we will do it” . As a writer and a director I would expect to be kicked out of any rehearsal room where I offered that up as an answer to unsure actors. None of this succeeds in disguising the all pervading Hubris of attempting to justify the naturalistic representation of the Holocaust through it’s victims. This seems to tell us that the makers of this peice know only to well that the rest of us Holocaust Drama practitioners have long ago abandoned this practice and for very good and very comprehensively documented reasons. As in Jane Fonda’s ‘Vietnam Journey’ the event itself (The Holocaust) is only made real to us through the emotion portrayed by the actor as she suffers at having to portray the horror. Thus the distancing mechanism backfires on itself and we have the double pornography of the-alas I have to pretend to be a Holocaust survivor , please pity my sad plight, weeping fest. Audiences however do seem to love ‘realism’ of this kind and the second hand catharsis and emotions that usually accompany it. The actor portrays herself as a hero for enduring the pain of representing the suffering of others. The audience then of course weeps for the actors suffering , has a ‘ good time’ and then goes home leaving those of us who have to live on a daily basis with the consequences of the actual Holocaust feeling marginalised bitter, betrayed and worse still-inadequate. “What’s wrong with me?” was actually my first thought at the end of the play. “Why can’t I enjoy a good cry about the Holocaust along with the rest of the Audience? I’’ I will tell you why- because I have had to live with it’s aftermath and it’s aftermath is 'goneness', there is nobody there, there is only emptiness and pain, and to allow oneself to wallow in it as some of the actors are encouraged to do in this production would result in our not surviving. And surviving and living with the hideous void is all we have. A actor acquaintance of mine who was a Concentration Camp survivor, went to audition for an extra’s role, as a Concentration Camp inmate, for the US TV series ‘Holocaust’, before she went to the audition her husband told her-”Whatever you do don’t tell them you where actually in the camps” She told them and was rushed out of the audition room faster than a pork chop away from a Lubavitch Barmitzvah. Suffering does not ennoble and many survivors are exceedingly difficult to live and deal with. It is all but impossible to ever find a straight -line connection between what they have experienced, which in reality they almost never tell, and their present state of being and modes of operating on a daily basis with other people. To naturalistically portray these mainly dead or dying people is a pornography and insulting. The writers task in tackling the subject area is to find another way. The play “Memory” in it’s present form is not it. At the end of the play, in front of the totally gratuitously flourished and rather huge Menorah ( 8 branched Candelabra for the festival of Hanukah) with the candles all lit purely on the strength of the equally gratuitous line- “Light it, it’s pretty” the suffering Jewish woman survivor is told by her Jewish grandson that, soon her suffering will be over, she will be dead, but her murdered children will be waiting to join her in heaven. Great! Just what we needed - a Christian recipe for post Holocaust Jewish happiness. How have we managed all these years without such insights? The Grandchildren will not be waiting for her. They are gone, That is the reality, and to survive one must never forget it. Those who tried to escape the hell of the camps through dreaming and fantasy were the first to perish. Likewise with Survivors. There is much unintentional transference of this kind in the play. The Israeli Soldier when asked by his Palestinian Victim, why he is going to destroy his house, replies” I don’t know-I’m just carrying out orders” I don’t have a problem with that echo of German soldiers at the Nuremburg trials. I do have a problem, springing from my knowledge of Israelis. They are, for fairly obvious reasons, ferociously political and they may be wrong but all of them think they understand why they are doing what they are doing and are extremely vocal about it. This is a British non political youth transposed to Israel, Palestine. That conflict deserves better than to be used as a spring board for a writer’s sound bite. I would like to say that the play called Memory is well meaning. For instance it modestly and discretely places off stage the sexual use of the woman as she attempts to buy the life of her and family by giving her body to a Nazi officer. we watch the husband alone on stage trying to suppress his emotions. Unfortunately he is allowed to fail at suppressing them. We are then told later that he killed himself, we are not remotely surprised. The production then gives us full frontal emotional melt down as the woman confronts her suppressed tragedy. Instead of letting us weep for her inability to forgive herself , she weeps openly and unrestrainedly for herself. No, it is the “actor” we see weeping for herself. Survivors like her have stopped weeping long ago they can not, they dare not. weep. That is the tragedy of the Holocaust. Sam Boardman-Jacobs Reader in Theatre & Media Award Leader MA Scriptwriting Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries University of Glamorgan |
Reviewed by: Sam Boardman-Jacobs |
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