Mud, lice and moral courage – Julia Pascal's new play takes a visceral dive into a lesser known period of World War II
La Marseillaise, France's national anthem, blares. It’s Paris, 1940, and a group of women refugees – Jews and anti-Nazi activists who've fled Germany – are laughing, arguing and making plans in the city where they’ve found a haven of safety. It can’t last, and it doesn’t. Within weeks, thousands are rounded up at the Vel’ d’Hiv stadium and shipped south to Gurs, an internment camp in the Pyrenean foothills. Julia Pascal’s play locks us in for six weeks of that summer.
Among the prisoners is Hannah Arendt, branded an “enemy alien” along with thousands of other German and Austrian internees – shockingly, the deportation order was given by the French government. The story is personal for Pascal: in 2017 an American cousin revealed that Pascal’s own aunt and grandmother had been held at Gurs, and she started digging. The result is a bold, ambitious piece of theatre.
Mai Weisz’s Arendt bonds with the artist Charlotte Salomon (Anna Eckhard), whose presence at the camp is imagined, since the French burned the records. She also becomes close to Eva Daube (Ariella Barnett), a fiery 16-year-old Communist inspired by two of Pascal’s relatives. One survived. The other vanished.
On a bare stage, the cast conjures the camp with startling vividness: the treacherous, sucking mud the women must wade through to reach the latrines (in a chilling mime sequence, one of the detainees is swallowed up in its filthy depths), the cruelty of the guards, the constant torment of lice. Camp life develops its own grim laws, most memorably when Arendt sits in judgement on a fellow prisoner caught stealing bread.
Pascal throws everything into the pot: cabaret, mime, dance sequences, philosophical monologues and even Jewish prayer harmonies. Anja Fahlenkamp’s original music, including some gorgeous acappella passages, is a highlight, but the variety can leave the evening feeling scattered, and the expressionistic style occasionally holds us at arm’s length. Arendt herself comes across as rather remote and intellectual, and the courtroom scene, a potentially powerful centrepiece, is weighed down by wordiness that blunts its dramatic punch.
Yet it's hard to resist a company this committed. The cast attacks the material with energy and passion, and their physical ensemble work is a joy, binding the production together with sheer conviction. This is a story that deserves to be told, one about women whose lives risk slipping out of the historical record and of a little-known corner of the war that too few of us know.
By Rebecca Taylor
Photos by Alex Brenner
The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940 runs until Saturday 7 November. 7pm, 6.30pm (Fri & Sat), 3pm (Sat only). From £15. Arcola Theatre, E8 3DL. arcolatheatre.com