Tectonic Theatre Project presents a powerful exploration of how everyday acts can lead to atrocities
A grainy black and white photo shows a grinning man perched on a fence eating blueberries. On either side he’s surrounded by dozens of young women, laughing and joking as they tuck into berries from delicate china bowls. The scene resembles an innocent work trip to the country perhaps, or a hiking or scout group excursion. Other pictures show couples lounging in deck chairs, men drinking beer, children decorating a Christmas tree. However, these seemingly everyday holiday snaps belie a horrific truth.
Behind the shots and out of view are the barbed wires, crematorium chimneys and emaciated prisoners of Auschwitz. The men are SS officers, the women clerical staff, and their lives as employees of the death camp are all featured in images from a photo album that was sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. Not one inmate is featured in the book.
Who sent the album, why it was sent, the stories behind the pictures and the disturbing questions they raise are the focus of Tectonic Theatre Project’s riveting drama, Here There Are Blueberries, written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich.
Under Kaufman’s tight direction, the play unfolds like a detective story. Evidence is presented forensically on the stark set, like a police investigation, with the photos blown up on the theatre’s back wall, figures circled and details enlarged and scrutinised.
The action is propelled by the probing of Dr Rebecca Erbelding, the museum archivist who first received the album. Sensitively played by Philippine Velge, we see her grapple with the many complexities of the story. Velge is one of the eight-strong cast who seamlessly juggle a range of parts, from Nazi officers and their descendants, to a Jewish survivor and museum staff. Their different voices and viewpoints offer a nuanced exploration of guilt and responsibility as well as the ethics of documenting historic materials.
The documentary feel to the piece is similar to that of Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest, about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who lived with his family next door to the camp – and both could be accused of removing the victims’ stories from the narrative. Except the show winds you in with a macabre momentum so that when we finally do hear a survivors testimony it comes as a powerful punch.
As with Glazer’s film, the play is really about the chilling ease with which normality sits alongside horror – Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ – how everyday, small acts are part of the larger monstrosity. Is a young woman who relays an order for poisonous gas down a telephone line as culpable in genocide as the officer who rounds up inmates and pushes them into the gas chamber?
Here There Are Blueberries forces us to ask: as intolerance, antisemitism and xenophobia feel, once again, increasingly normalised, what too, are we capable of?
By Rebecca Taylor
Photos by Mark Senior
Here There Are Blueberries runs until Saturday 7 March. 7.30pm, 3pm (Thu & Sat only). From £10. Theatre Royal Stratford East, E15 1BN. stratfordeast.com