Memory at the Pleasance Theatre

Memory at the Pleasance Theatre

03 October, 2008
by: Jimmy

In one of Philip Roth's early Zuckerman novels, there's a kind of repeated joke about a theatrical production of Anne Franks' Diary. Characters dubious of Zuckerman's personal morality (he's a bestselling, but pornographic, literary Jewish novelist) and, especially his mother, continually compare his work to the Diary's successful theatrical adaptation. As a way of validating their comparison, these characters never fail to mention how many curtain calls each performance enjoys. On the one hand it's a typically subversive 'Jewish Mother joke' at which Roth is the great genius ('be good, never forget your heritage – and, Hey look! You can make money from it too!'). But more subtlety it pokes at the question of what is respectful in depictions of the Holocaust; of how and whether Art should get involved with it depicting at all. Anne Frank's diary, it seems to be suggested, is both impossible to compete with and not at all suitable for adaptation. It's the authentic document, so what does a theatrical version achieve except to turn it into one more competing show, a show that ultimately, or even simply partially, will be judged on its box office? Of course it's a question that's been run over many times in many different forms and there probably isn't a single university humanities course in the Western World that doesn't touch on it at some point. But I was reminded of Roth's joke here because Memory at the Pleasance Theatre, though well directed, well acted and with a script that is both thoughtful and serious minded, still fails. Not least because it too enjoyed several curtain calls – including a separate one for the lead member of the cast – which made uncomfortable viewing. The spell of the drama had been broken, but should the audience have been allowed to become spellbound? Spells belong to fantasies.

What makes Memory different from most other productions about the Holocaust is its approach to tackling this question of representation. The play starts with a company arriving on a minimalist stage in dribs and drabs for rehearsal, slurping tea and discussing script changes, parking meters and cars, while the director sits beside a piano in the corner bashing duff notes from Bach's Goldberg variations. One inadvertent bonus of this technique is that one cares less than usual about accents, you don't mind for example that the German SS officer occasionally rolls his 'r's' because half an hour earlier you've heard him complaining about a late running train from Llareggub.

The play the company is working on is called Memory and the scenes they perform don't necessarily appear to come in the correct order; either in the performance or that they might appear should the play within in the play, be played straight. But gradually the actors fall into the characters they're performing; from early stumbles corrected by the director to full immersion with almost no interventions, until only the director's silent presence is a reminder of the artificiality of the premise. The measured increase of props and costumes, besides some careful lighting also works well . The play proper consists of three parts: the first, set in Berlin in the mid-1990s, concerns Eva a seventy-eight year old Holocaust survivor meeting her grandson for the first time; the second follows her life in the thirties caught between two men, German Jewish Aron and Ayran Felix; and there's a third, seemingly unrelated, strand set in 2006 in Bethlehem about a forced eviction. This all sounds more complicated than the experience of watching it turns out to be, but it's a mark of the plays ambition.

Most critics so far have pointed out that the third section is given only cursory attention and that the argument it proposes (very crudely that of all races the Jews should understand the importance of memory in informing present day decisions) may be bold but seems underpowered. I would suggest that the error is much more fundamental. The two stories could never connect; they're not equivalents. The Israeli security wall has more in common with the Great Wall of China than the Berlin Wall, but then again how much history can people endure? In spite of some very good writing there's a lurking crassness to the whole play. It pops out in the occasional line – would any Palestinian really describe his own people as 'the Jews of Arabia' while an Israeli bulldozer lurks in his back garden? It's a line of conciliatory self-abnegation that smacks of leftist wish fulfilment.

More significantly there's a problem with the storyline itself, which, like so many other films, books and plays, inadvertently reduces the war to the backdrop of a domestic melodrama – not nearly as much some others – but even so enough that one ends up wondering whether one character becomes a Nazi simply because he has been unlucky in love, and whether this kind of failure is therefore at the heart of what it means to be a Nazi, and so on. In the end both storyline and stagecraft seem not to be modes in which to approach the Holocaust but ways in which true engagement with such horror can be avoided. The tragic revelation at the play's conclusion – a sequence which is seemingly 'too much' for one of the actors – in fact relates to two characters who never appear on stage. Their story is only told the audience at, as it were, fourth hand.

'Memory' is an interesting play and a lot of it is extremely worthy: it engages with the one advantage that theatre has left over art forms (direct, confrontational embodiment of ideas) and the acting, especially of Vivien Parry, is exemplary. Nevertheless it is flawed and perhaps that's a good thing, because if we ever claim to have worked out how to tell the story of the Holocaust it will probably demonstrate that we have forgotten what it means.


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Jimmy