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IN TOWN THIS MONTH: THEATRE<br />
A Good Jew<br />
A Holocaust tale, by Jonathan Brown<br />
I’ve been interested in the Holocaust since<br />
visiting the Holocaust Museum in Houston,<br />
Texas, in 1988. My wife, Annika, is German,<br />
which has fuelled my interest. In her neighbouring<br />
village in Bavaria, for example, many Jewish<br />
people vanished in the war. I found it striking<br />
that some of their houses are still occupied by<br />
relatives of the locals who took possession of the<br />
buildings.<br />
There’s a Romeo and Juliet element to this<br />
story, which starts in Frankfurt in the late 30s.<br />
Sol is a Jewish concert pianist. Hilda plays in the<br />
same orchestra and is the daughter of an SS officer.<br />
So their love crosses the divide. Sol invents<br />
a new Aryan identity to protect himself, but<br />
becomes drawn into the Nazi machine; Hilda,<br />
thinking he has been taken to Theresienstadt<br />
concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, takes on<br />
a Jewish identity in order to get into the camp<br />
and find him.<br />
Theresienstadt was a strange camp. It was<br />
where the Germans sent many Jewish musicians,<br />
artists, actors and directors. Having first transported<br />
many former inmates to Auschwitz, and<br />
cleaned it up to resemble a model camp, the SS<br />
allowed a Swiss Red Cross inspector access. After<br />
being led along a limited tour route, he gave it<br />
a clean bill of health. Later the famed director<br />
Kurt Gerron, a camp internee, was similarly<br />
forced to create a propaganda film. He and many<br />
of those appearing were subsequently gassed.<br />
There was a lot of subterfuge and identity<br />
shifting going on, including cases of Nazis<br />
trying to pass themselves off as Jewish after the<br />
liberation of the camp. Of course as an actor and<br />
director I’m drawn to all this identity shifting.<br />
We’ve set up a crowdfunding campaign to<br />
help fund this project and tell this story.<br />
Once we cover the £3,000 of costs, the company<br />
can start to make a profit. So we heartily welcome<br />
more pledgers and, moreover, plenty of<br />
ticket sales!<br />
We’re putting it on at the All Saints. We<br />
needed a lot of room as it’s a big story – set all<br />
over Europe – with eight in the cast.<br />
In the last Brighton Fringe I did a completely<br />
improvised show – Je Suis: A Fool’s Guide to<br />
Cliff Edges. It was filled with comic elements,<br />
but it wasn’t comedy. The subject matter depended<br />
on what was brought up on the day. My<br />
mother had been very ill and she died during the<br />
run, which was reflected in the way the shows<br />
turned out. I saw the performance I did the night<br />
she died partly as a poem for her. The audience<br />
that evening became an integral part of what<br />
became an intense, funny and poignant journey<br />
to the very departure gates of life.<br />
As told to Alex Leith<br />
A Good Jew, All Saints, <strong>June</strong> 4th and 5th.<br />
somethingunderground.co.uk<br />
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