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Marianne Oldham as Mother, Phil Cheadle as Father, the Commandant of Auschwitz, and Eleanor Thorn as Gretel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Wolverhampton Grand
*****
JOHN Boyne’s 2006 novel has its detractors, many holocaust survivors,
but the fact it is on the National Curriculum and this stage adaptation
brings in youngsters and school parties does at least mean its message
of man’s inhumanity to man is not going unheard. The story
is simple, Bruno is nine and living a comfortable, middle-class life, or
as comfortable as possible, in 1943, wartime Berlin,
as the son of a senior Wehrmacht officer along with his sister Gretel,
mother and the family maid,
Maria. A visit by
Hitler, The Führer, or, as Bruno mistakenly calls him, The Fury, sees
Bruno’s father promoted to Commandant of Out-With, Bruno’s
interpretation of Auschwitz,
and the entire family move to
Poland and one of the most infamous camps in history where, amid the
horror of the holocaust a more personal tragedy is set in train. Bruno
defies instructions that the camp is out of bounds to go exploring where
he finds Shmuel, a young boy the same age, down to the same birthday,
making them somehow
twins of fate. Shmuel is on the other side of the wire, the boy in the
striped pyjamas. The
father, played with Teutonic bearing by Phil Cheadle, is a committed
Nazi, to him Out-with is merely a place to facilitate Hitler’s final
solution, with the beings inside the wire not even human. It is a
view not shared by his mother, Bruno's
grandmother, a former
theatrical star, played with the commanding presence of a faded diva,
and a lovely Dietrich singing voice,
by Helen Anderson.
She hates hates Hitler,
her son’s new job and what Hitler and Nazism have turned her son into
with a vengeance. She stays
in Berlin and with her outspoken views we are never sure if her
subsequent death is due to natural or Nazi causes. Eleanor
Thorn’s Gretel is 14, an obedient teenager who does not question what is
happening and becomes infatuated with a young 19-year-old lieutenant at
Auschwitz, Kotler, blond, Aryan and brainwashed into the Nazi cause,
played by Ed Brody.
Kotler is
to discover the harsh realities of the Third Reich when
it is discovered his father fled to Switzerland in 1938 and he
finds himself transferred from
carrying out genocide in relative safety to being cannon fodder on the
front line. Marianne
Oldham takes the mother on a journey from an efficient housewife
ensuring the smooth running of a large household in Berlin to a drunk
who cannot face the reality of her
husband’s job
and what he has become
when she is sober. Whether she is also having an affair with Kotler is
implied but never revealed. Maria,
played by Rosie Wyatt, is the maid and also a useful device showing both
the cruelty of the Commandant in the way he treats anyone he regards as
socially inferior, and also his kindness to her dying mother and to her
in giving her a job. Hovering
in the background is Pavel, played with suitable submissiveness by
Robert Styles, an inmate of Auschwitz who survives by being used as a
servant for the Commandant in the barracks. He used to be a doctor but
now peels vegetables and serves at table. And Both are
nine, the same age as their characters, and it is a remarkable
performance for a pair so young, not only in the
huge number of lines they
had to learn, Bruno is on stage most of the time, but also in making
their characters believable and convincing. Bruno is like many young boys, an inquiring mind, a need to explore, a thirst for adventure, easily forgetting being told not to go near the camp when it seems so interesting, in a less serious moment he is almost a German Just William. He has that annoying habit of small boys to question everything and be into everything so it was only a matter of time before he made his way to the wire. Naively he envies Shmuel because he has so many boys of his own age to play with in the camp while he has no other child around but Gretel Hibbard’s Shmuel has a matter of fact, clear voice as he talks about the camp almost as if it has become normality. Neither he
nor Bruno seem to have grasped the reality of what is going on no matter
which side of the wire you are on with Shmuel looking for his father who
has gone Director Joe Murphy avoids allowing the story to become mawkish, indeed part of the horror comes from making the running of a concentration camp merely a job no different from, say, managing a baked bean factory. Murphy
keeps up a good pace utilizing a clever set from designer Robert Innes
Hopkins using a large revolve as the stage.
It allows
nice touches such as when Bruno and Gretel climb a chest of drawers to
look from a window to see the camp at the rear of the stage,
the revolve brings them
around to the front
so that, with clever lighting
from Malcolm Rippeth, they stare out at the audience.
We become the Jews in the
camp. We also
get Nazi soldiers in greatcoats and coal scuttle helmets as stage hands
among the cast of 13 once we arrive at Out-with, along with the barbed
wire fence dividing the stage into us and them, which helps set the
scene beautifully,
while the use of
a huge rear video screen projecting blurry images of 1940s Berlin or
monochrome
images of Auschwitz,
along with
typed introductions
for each scene is inspired. The book,
and this adaptation by Angus Jackson, tells audiences it is a fable -
technically it isn’t, it’s a parable - and has sold in excess of five
million copies despite criticism from both historians and Jewish
organisations, including Holocaust survivors. The main
rebukes range from the implausibility of Bruno’s naivety about Jews and
Hitler, particularly as he is the son of a committed Nazi officer and
presumably taught in a pro-Nazi Berlin school. There are doubts Hitler, and his mistress, would visit a relatively low ranking officer to offer him an equally low level job or that an officer would take a young family with him to such a place, while, citing a lack of basic research, there is the claim that there were no nine year old boys in Auschwitz as those too young, too old or too infirm to work were eliminated upon arrival. But the
story is not a documentary, it is a parable, making a point, and
remember it is written for children. Bruno and Shmuel
are fictional figures, equal in so many ways other than race, who
represent the two sides of the
horrific Nazi
equation. This faithful
stage adaptation
does at least mean the point is
being made, even if historical accuracy
is vague and reality is
watered down. It at least
serves as an introduction
for children, preparing
their
emotions; the facts and the true horror can come later. The
Children’s Touring Partnership has brought us Goodnight Mr Tom
and Swallows and Amazons in the past and this is another
superbly presented and directed production, moving and with a gut
wrenching ending. To 13-06-15 Roger Clarke
09-06-15 The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas opens at Coventry Belgrade on Tuesday 16 June running to Saturday 20 June. Book here
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