WAY TO HEAVEN. To 9 July.
London
WAY TO HEAVEN
by Juan Mayorga translated by David Johnston
Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs) To 9 July 2005
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 4pm
Runs 1hr 45min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7565 5000
www.royalcourttheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 June
Journey to the false heart of evil and theatre as the art of deception.Soviet writer and moral force Maxim Gorky visited one of Stalin's labour camps, finding the inmates sitting warm, well-fed and reading newspapers. It was a lie, of course, a set-up, so the ever-truthful Gorky could tell the world how finely Soviet prisoners were treated. No-one dared speak; to signal the false situation the prisoners read their papers upside-down. Gorky never noticed.
Nor did the Red Cross representative, revisiting the grasslands that were once a Nazi concentration camp, in Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga's brilliantly-constructed Way to Heaven ever penetrate the falsely happy scene as Jewish people played in the square, sold balloons, a young man giving his girl a present. Jeff Rawle's Representative recalls the 1942 visit years after, with regretful self-justification.
He had been allowed to look everywhere. Really? I remember a British visitor to China talk glowingly of Mao's administration. He'd been able to travel anywhere and was confident nobody could organise such large-scale deception. This, just after the Cultural Revolution's slaughters and mass starvation.
Ramin Gray's promenade production draws us all in. Rawle sits among us, an ordinary person with humanitarian leanings. He looks out from a denuded Theatre Upstairs to Sloane Square as his character did on the Jewish people in the German square of 1942. Then the square's life children playing, balloon-seller, lovers bursts among us. But the lovers repeat lines dully, as if in rehearsal.
There's the first reference to the dawn trains, bringing prisoners to the Infirmary' a disturbing sound repeatedly mentioned. The path from platform to Infirmary is the Way to Heaven, its far-end a bright light like that which Sebastian Faulks describes consuming the 2 Jewish children in Charlotte Gray.
Finally, on a raised platform stage, Dominic Rowan's confident, cultured Commandant and Richard Katz's glumly complicit Jewish leader plan the false spectacle for the Red Cross visitor. Utterly devoid of ornamentation in playing, previous images and hints fall into place. Audience members clutch volumes from the cultured Europe the Commandant so admires. The point's forcefully clear: complicity is a matter of circumstance, while theatre can aid lies as well as expose truth.
Red Cross Representative: Jeff Rawle
Boys: Jack Binysh, Jake Briski, Leon Garner, Alexander Main, Abraham Pirry
Balloon Seller:John Barrard
Young Couple on Bench: Vanessa Ackerman, Daniel Hart
Second Woman on Bench: Claire Lichie
Girl: Emma Pinto
Gershom Gottfried: Richard Katz
Commandant: Dominic Rowan
Director: Ramin Gray
Designer: Miriam Buther
Lighting: Johanna Town
Sound: Ian Dickinson
Company Voice Work: Patsy Rodenburg
Assistant director: Simon Breden
2005-06-29 12:27:31