Viva Lewes Issue 117 June 2016

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