Response to Playing For Time

It's 7:44am, it's my second coffee of the day and I'm sitting on a train heading back to my hometown/homeplace/place-of-home(?) that is the Wirral: a glorious, coastal, soul-sucking vacuum; where returning always feels like shrugging on an old, itchy, Wooly jumper (pun intended) that I've outgrown: a geographical clique whose tedious secrets I was never let in on and spat me out a long time ago.
At this point in my life, I think I'd rather have a job sniffing farts and scoring them out of ten than live in place where one might go to vegetate in a retirement home with a salty, sea view, or buy a house with a mortgage that screams future divorce and succeeding mid-life crisis. Don't worry, I'm not as bitter as you might think and I actually had an amazing childhood and still have a circle of friends on the Wirral, but caffeine has quickened my typing thumbs and sharpened my reckless tongue.


But. What if. What if. What if.


Let's rewind to 1935. What if I were Jewish (and a Jewish woman at that), student, travelling on a train, writing something outspoken to a public medium and living in Germany. Maybe at the next stop, SS guards would have spotted a yellow Star of David on my jacket breast and hauled me off the train; like real-life embodiments of the hounds of hell who burned my words and tried to scour the innards of my brain with bleach.

Would I have been able to return home to my parents in 1935, just 80 years ago?

I am thankful that I am fortunate enough to live in a country with freedom of speech and freewill, and although I am not religious, I would be free to belong to a religion without dictatorial persecution. One lady, whose rights such as these were snatched away by the Nazi regime, was Fania Fénelon.

Fania Fénelon was a French musician, composer and cabaret singer who was living in Nazi-occupied Paris at the time of her arrest. She was half-Jewish, supported the French Resistance and throughout the duration of her incarceration in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fania kept a diary of her life inside the notorious, working camp.

Her memoirs were documented in the form of a play, by Arthur Miller - Playing For Time.

I blogged about wanting to see the play earlier in the year and indeed, I went to Sheffield to see the play at the Crucible a few weeks ago with my German friend, Clara. I often find it hard to talk to Clara about the Holocaust, although she has always been open when asked questions on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (as 'vlogged', back in Feb). We were both very emotional when watching PFT, and especially stunned at Siân Phillips' searing performance.

You can watch the trailer here, but really, I implore you to go and see this play for the finale performance tonight, at the Crucible theatre. Take tissues.

An Interview with a native...

You'll only be able to understand the following interview, wenn Sie deutsch sprechen können.
In the interview I'm discussing with my lovely beste Freundin, Clara, about Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) as a third generation, native German speaker, and how Germany's confrontation with the past has shaped her life.

Apologies for the poor sound and video quality, but I hope you enjoy the interview and if you'd like to hear a translation of the interview - keep your eyes peeled on this blog within the next few weeks!

Playing for Time

Like a true ENFP, I've been very distracted lately. I've taken up Brasilian jiu-jitsu to compliment the tri-weekly training sessions I attend for Underwater Hockey, last week I presented at the UGRE event to talk about my experience as an intern for this project, and tonight I'm teaching the Escape:CYT group how to give an Indian Head Massage (sure, anytime you like).

I haven't been organised enough to write any posts lately but I've been scribbling them up in my brain to type down the minute I get 20 minutes of free time.

My favourite milk-shake bar has an index of flyers on the windowsill, and a few nights ago I had a peruse whilst I waited for my Reece's Pieces regular shake. I saw a flyer for a play that is on at the Crucible Theatre throughout March and April with tickets available from £5 to £23. I want to plan a trip to Sheffield to see Playing for Time, a critically acclaimed.play by Arthur Miller based on Fania Fénelon's autobiographical memoir inside Auschwitz. Making music with an orchestra of women prisoners, Fania sang for the Nazi captors in an act of survival.

It sounds brilliant, and I'd really like to see it with a group of like-minded drama enthusiasts who read German, as well as thinking about it as a piece of Holocaust literature.

Stuart Taberner on South African TV!

Taken with a play

I'm exhausted. That kind of curtains-closed, emotionally drawn tired that sucks out the marrow of life. No doubt thanks to the stunning play I saw this afternoon at the Theatre Royal, as Taken at Midnight unfolded on the stage. It was brilliant.

As I travel back to Costa del Merseyside for the weekend, I'm left crashing hard on to the rocks of an emotion hangover. I'm reeling from the 'second-hand emotion' (Thanks, Downton) of Penelope Wilton, whose role was the mother of incarcerated Hans Litten (Martin Hutson). Not a single line was wasted. The set was cast in expressionistic shadow which framed the harsh lines and sharp angles of the cell walls. I sound pretentious, but full disclosure: I don't care - this stuff interests me and it's my blog.

Despite the mise en scène, it felt very real. And it was; Taken at Midnight portrays the true story of Hans Litten's call to put Hitler in the witness stand and his struggle afterwards. I thought Hutson played Litten's last months in Dachau like a broken man reads his bruises like instructions. It was so powerful that I felt overwhelmed all at once by the weighty fact that 6 million+ people were murdered.

Plays like Taken at Midnight not only offer a voice for political prisoners, but show the brutality of SS and SA soldiers before the war broke out. I hope this 'sort-of' review has done the play justice.

You can watch an interview with Penelope Wilton and director, Mark Hayhurst, here:

In other theatre related news, earlier this week when I told one of my housemates that I'd been to see Kindertransport, a play about children of the Holocaust, she asked, "What's the Holocaust?". I was shocked that even at 22, she has no knowledge of the Holocaust at all. She may be smart, but she won't be the only one! The average age in Theatre Royal today must've been about 50. I guess that I, at 21, was one of the youngest members of the audience. Are my generation even bothered about Holocaust memory? If humans don't know or care about the horrors of the past, we cannot learn from it and are therefore destined to repeat it.

As I return to the Wirral in a lottery/lucky dip between confusion and sentiment you may find I'm only contactable by owl post this weekend. Alternatively, you could try morse code but even the Wizza has signal these days.

Welcome, King of Changetown! Population: You.

This image came up on Facebook, but it hasn't been easy to find the original source. Thanks to our best friend Google, about 707,000,000 results popped up in 0.19 seconds (impressive) but I still haven't found the original link - please bare with me.

These days it's hard to commit to stuff. Pro-activity can be a chore and on some days I can't say I'd be an advocate of committing to anything more than to the bottom of a Vaseline tin. However, this image boiled away at my brain...

I want to be productive and pro-active but it's hard to materialize the confidence to say that you're THAT shiny orb of sunshine and lead a new initiative that promotes change. It's not just standing in the firing line, but it's also a huge responsibility to guard the facts and to be right. I suppose most people pretend that they're right, so much so that it is no longer a pretense. Again, I admit I'm getting onto a subject that I don't really know much about so that is where I'll stop.

I want everyone to be bothered by learning about the Holocaust. Does that make sense? I feel so strongly that people need to know about it, that it hurts. Even in the face of something so awful, one has to choose to learn about it, in order to learn from it. However as Ruth Rogoff asserts, and publicly shares her experience on the  The Children of the Holocaust (still on BBC iPlayer if you're reading this before 14/02/15), although it's important to learn about history and believe that genocide will never happen again, the fact is; as parents and human beings, we do make the same mistakes that we promised ourselves we'd never do again. It's the 'frailty of the human being' to repeat mistakes. Ruth also says that children and young people are more tolerant and that 'it's getting better'.

I am unsure what to think. Who is going to take the responsibility to inform people? The Children of the Holocaust was a stunning and thought-provoking programme with artistic visions aimed for young people. Those 45 minutes document themes like Kindertransport and experiences in a concentration camp with accessible language, images and testimonies - I hope that everyone gets the chance to see it while they can.

But in 100 years, who is going to provide testimonies? Of course, these are all questions that have been asked before and there is a lot of literature that can testify too. There seems to be so much genocide in the newspapers and media every day. Have we really learned anything at all?

Asking questions and trying to form a coherent answer isn't enough. There's hope in that there are opportunities of future workshops for schools being developed that teaches empathy to young people.

But does too much empathy mystify the past? The door needs to be opened for future generations of young people to develop their own humanity without mystifying the past events. After all, we are put on earth to be human....

Pre-performance discussion of 'Kindertransport'

As I walked into campus this morning on my way to the Kindertransport workshop (FYI with hair channelling my inner-Hagrid and Premonitions blasting through my headphones), I realised I knew basically nothing about the reality of Kindertransport.

Yeah, I knew about the facts. Over a 9 month period starting days after the devastation of Kristallnacht in 1938, 10,000 Jewish refugee children bundled onto trains after having been waved off by parents they'd likely never see again.

Yeah, I'd seen the play a few years back and one of my friends currently studying Drama in Lancaster  is rehearsing it at the moment. But I hadn't really taken it in.

Then I remembered I'd read a book as a child by Barry Turner, about the deportation of thousands of Jewish children. One Small Suitcase is based on true accounts of Kindertransport, and what it means to be separated from family, or rather sent away by parents in the hope of a life without persecution.

What I didn't realise is that many of the accounts were not happy ones.

After the 'Falling to our knees' performance a member of the Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association, Martin Kapel, shared his account of Kindertransport. He described how difficult it was to reconnect with his mother, who had a visa in France,

The play Kindertransport is about a woman who comes to face her past and open up to the memories and heritage she had tried to askew. In the workshop, Rachel and Maureen from LAC  shared with us their knowledge of the deportation of Jewish children in 1938. They explained that the refugees could have  been placed in a lottery of foster homes, where many children were expected to work for keep. Some children, like Eva in the play, were fortunate that a proportion of foster parents just wanted to 'help' but the fact remains that the people looking after the children could've been anyone. It's such a stark contrast to the process of fostering a child in today's society, where fostering parties must jump through governmental hoops, a year's worth of paperwork and most importantly - CRB checks. In 1938 there was the need to place the children quickly (9 months...) so there was no barrier against the type of people who volunteered to protect a child - especially those with ulterior motives.

We can only thank the survivors who share their experiences with us.

Taken After Midnight

I still feel like I'm at a bit of a loose end, now that the conference is over. My bedroom is a stew of scripts, light cues, programmes and scraps of notes that I've taken from the few plenaries that I did manage to catch.

How am I going to organise all of the thoughts and questions that have come up, in light of listening to the brilliant academics and delegates? There's just too much to say. There are too many questions. I was naive to think that I could sum up the topics that were discussed in only a few blog posts. It's all pending, though, let me get my reading out of the way first.


Anyway, as a way to continue thinking about how the Holocaust is dramatised, I'm going to see the acclaimed play by Mark Hayhurst, Taken After Midnight starring Penelope Wilton at Theatre Royal Haymarket. I'm going with my aunt, Gill (I've previously blogged about her experience visiting Holocaust Memorials in Budapest).


The play, running for only 8 weeks, is a true story about a mother's heroic battle to save her son, an incarcerated Jewish lawyer, who took on the Nazis and put Hitler on the stand in 1930s Germany.

You can book tickets here. See you there?

Kindertransport - a play by Diane Samuels

At the start of February I'll going to watch an exciting new production, premièred at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds – Kindertransport by Diane Samuels. One of the actors, Alan Buttery, is a graduate of German at Leeds.

The play tells the story of a young Jewish girl, Eva, who travels from Germany to Manchester in the winter of 1938/9 as part of the ‘Kindertransport’ programme organised by the British Government to grant safe passage to Britain for Jewish children in Germany persecuted under the National Socialist regime. The focus of the play is on how the adult Eva (now called Evelyn) deals with her past and constructs a new identity for herself. For more information, please see the playwright’s website: http://www.dianesamuels.com/index.php/theatre/kinder-transport. 

I'm excited to attend the pre- and post- performance workshops that will discuss many of the key themes and issues within the play that will further my understanding and empathy towards survivors of the Holocaust.

It feels really relevant to attend the workshops, especially in light of the discussion after the final 'Falling to our knees' performance last Tuesday. The input from the cast felt vital when considering the measures to be taken to ensure that future generations can be informed of the Holocaust and learn about it in more accessible ways that just copying from a textbook or whiteboard.

So the conference is, like, over now....

Whoa. The past 4 days have been a whirlwind. Two GREAT performances by the Escape:cyt cast of 'Falling to our knees', one in the town hall and one that brought the whole conference to a dramatic end. 

This amazing experience has been a learning curve, and I feel very fortunate to have been a part of not only the production process, but also the conference. The conference was over two days in a variety of locations on the University of Leeds campus and two exhibitions that took place in the Parkinson Building.

It's not my first time attending a conference, but it was the first time I've ever sat on a panel answering questions from an audience. The cast were great - absolute naturals - answering questions with the sort of eloquent loquacity that you'd expect of somebody twice their age. Well done, everyone!

After the performance and Q&A session, there was a reception and social in which people were networking and circulating. It felt uplifting to talk to the professors and academics whom I admire, but to whom I didn't have to guts to ask questions in the plenaries. I just really like people, y'know? Despite the serious topic, I feel energised by the enthusiasm of the academics that I have met, and the passion they clearly have for their subjects. It inspires me, it drives  me, to want to dip my toe into the ocean that is the world of further academia.

I don't want to stop blogging. I don't want to stop developing my knowledge of the Holocaust. Maybe this blog will become a space in which I attempt to come up with at least half an original idea on the topic that hasn't already been said by somebody who actually-knows-what-they're-talking-about, y'know?

I want to thank everyone who has assisted me in the past couple of months. I appreciate that. 

(I have just deleted a whole paragraph listing names of people who have guided me in this process - 

but quite frankly ain't nobody got time for that - this isn't Wembley and I haven't written a book yet, soooooo)

PEACE.

Day 10 - Town Hall Rehearsal

Now that I don't have to fret about revising for exams and that my coursework is all done and dusted, I feel like I can fully concentrate on the performances on the 25th and 27th of January (cheeky plug there). You know that stab of guilt you get when you're doing something important, but you know that you should be doing about 5 other equally as important - and possibly life changing - activities? Yeah, THAT.

Last night there was a run-through of the show in Leeds Town Hall and it was not only a great opportunity to practise scenes and rehearse the visual images, but I also managed to catch 20 minutes of a discussion taking place in the exhibition room. The discussion was hosted by two students from the University of Leeds, Rachel and Yerri, and involved members of The Holocaust Survivors' Friendship Association and the Leeds Jewish Welfare Board, who shared moving, personal experiences. There were many ideas regarding the initiative to educate young people on the Holocaust but I will talk in depth about this discussion in a later post

With the first performance only days away, and with a few members of the cast missing the rehearsals due to extreme illness, it seems like both tension and pressure is running high within the group. It can be a daunting thing, the first dress rehearsal on the stage, and it requires organisation and focus from the cast. However, I do feel as though my preparation could have been more thoroughly organised - something that will be straightened out come Saturday's rehearsal at the Workshop Theatre on the Leeds University campus. 

Here are a few stills from the Rudi/Horst scene. Don't worry, nobody's pride was hurt during the making of the production.

Procrasti-making

Instead of revising the finer points of German grammar or ploughing away at coursework like any normal student in the dreaded run-up to exam season, I've been happily procrasti-making and typing up notes for the show to form THE BOOK/ dramaturgist's bible.

THE BOOK
By creating a folder (more like a few heavy bricks) of information on blocking, scripts, cast lists and stage directions, it means that the rehearsing process is easier and smoother when reminding the cast of their exact position for certain scenes, for example Scene 5 from Narrator 9's line.. ("Yes, you stand there and look over there")....and so on.

Up until now creating my own version of THE BOOK has been straightforward. Lighting, technology, music and costumes have already been negotiated by Simon and Anthony and but to be honest, I had put it on the back-burner in my own mind whilst focusing on rehearsals.

Last night, we were joined by Emma, who is designing set and costume for the show. As mentioned in other posts, the set will be composed of a circle of handheld lightbulbs which will illuminate the stage and cast, but also will be turned off one by one throughout the performance to represent the destruction of family homes and Jewish lives. Costumes should not only be 'timeless', to bridge the gap between 'past' and 'present' scenes, but also link to the colour scheme found within a British passport to link to the passport puppets scene. 

We were also joined last night by Dave Murray, a musician from the Leeds College of Music. Part of the show involves a musical performance by Escape:CYT member, Thomas Madeley. Thomas will be playing the viola, accompanied by the soundtrack created by Dave, during Thomas' off-stage parts. Last night was the first time Thomas had ever seen the score for the piece, and I was very impressed to find he had already learnt it by the time came to rehearsing the section.

These are two aspects of the show that will fall into place at the rehearsal at the town hall next week, In the meantime, I will need to keep working on THE BOOK, with full notes on lighting, music and cues for the techies.

Day 9 - Rehearsals

Due to deadlines and impending exams, I didn't blog after last week's session. I still have deadlines and impending  doom  exams to do, so this will only be a short post to check-in.

As the title suggests, the group have been practising and ardently rehearsing the show. Nope, I'm not sharing any details now, so close to performance date, but I will divulge that it is looking great. The piece is a product of dark visuals contrasted with wordy, but fascinating text. Simon is still inciting the group to read text-y lines as though the words are real. We don't want the piece to be monotonous with the audience falling asleep in-between the visual sections, so it's interesting that the group continue to read lines as though they are narrating. However this improves all the time and once the group have learnt their lines off by heart, it will be much easier to direct the young people to inflect life and thought into their words.

Next week, the young people are rehearsing at Leeds Town Hall in costume and organisers/contributors of the exhibition will be observing. Although we are on target thereabouts in terms of progress through the script having rehearsed each section, it puts Simon, Anthony and I under some pressure to organise the group and piece together each scene. The problems that may arise could be lack of concentration due to the excitement of rehearsing in Leeds Town Hall, forgetting lines (or not having attempted to learn lines at all) and forgetting props or costume. In light of this, I'm going to play some fun games based on concentration at the start of the rehearsal to get everybody focused.

I still feel a surge of adrenaline/panic every time I think about the tasks yet to be completed for the show (could just be the quantity of coffee consumed), but I am so excited for the 25th and 27th of January to roll along so that the group can perform and to see the exhibition. Everyone's hard work will undoubtedly pay off, not only from Anthony, Simon and the group; but also academics and researchers.



Remember to book your tickets via Matt Boswell at rsvptransholomemory@gmail.com
and to check out https://twitter.com/TransHoloMemory for updates on the conference.