I Loathe A Man In Uniform | Diana Donnelly helps Brendan Gall rummage through his father's wartime souvenirs in East of Berlin.
DETAILS
Directed by Alisa Palmer. Written by Hannah Moscovitch. Starring Brendan Gall, Diana Donnelly, Paul Dunn. The Roxy (10708-124 St). To Mar. 29. Tickets available through TIX on the Square (402-1757/www.tixonthesquare) or The Roxy box office (453-2440).
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The Holocaust drama has become its own genre — an unimaginable historical horror that has been imagined so often there aren’t a lot of fresh angles left to take the subject on. But playwright Hannah Moscovitch has managed to find one: in East of Berlin, she focuses on the generation that was left to pick up the pieces, and examines the psychology of guilt affecting the children of perpetrators of those crimes against humanity.
Set more than 20 years after the Second World War, the play opens on Rudi (Brendan Gall) returning to his childhood home in Paraguay. He’s a chain-smoking wreck, for reasons that are revealed later. Soliloquies and flashbacks depict his struggle, over the past eight years, to come to terms with the revelation of his father’s role as an SS doctor. Gall addresses the audience immediately, breaking the fourth wall, yet his defensive demeanour puts up another wall in its stead. Moscovitch has said the play was based on interviews with children of Nazis conducted by children of victims — and Rudi’s relationship with the audience has a similarly uncomfortable dynamic. Gall combines frightening intensity with self-deprecating humor to illustrate the guilty struggle of a character who hasn’t actually done anything wrong. He plays Rudi with such ferocity, his words practically stuck in his teeth until they’re spat out with shame and anger, that he makes a conflict that’s largely inapplicable to us resonate.
Rudi’s “interview” with the audience is more compelling than the flashbacks between Rudi and his two great love interests: Hermann (Paul Dunn), a childhood friend and fellow Nazi offspring; and Sarah (Diana Donnelly), the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, whom he meets when he runs away to Berlin to both escape and find himself. These characters primarily exist to serve Rudi’s purposes, which range from revenge to absolution (“I loved her — that was somehow an act of redemption”), and so two talented actors wind up relegated to the periphery. It’s a shame, because Donnelly does so well with the material she’s given, most notably in a beautifully lit scene where she chokes up while reciting the Kaddish prayer for Rudi.
Moscovitch’s script is also unexpectedly funny, given the subject matter — there’s uncomfortable laughter when Rudi jokes about his father reading “Goethe ... and Mein Kampf” to him as a child, or when he reels off yet another Hitler joke. (Seriously — I tried to keep count of them, and failed miserably.) His humour is tasteless, but it clearly functions as a defence mechanism. Moscovitch also successfully imbues the play with a sense of hesitancy and tentativeness: characters often cannot finish their sentences and trail off with an “I don’t know ...” Stuttering and incomplete sentences can be jarring in a theatrical context, but here, they convincingly reflect the uncertainty these characters feel about moving forward.
Camellia Koo’s simple set is an effective space in which to explore the play’s conflicts. The long shelf set far downstage, trapping the actors in a sliver of stage, is full of ancient books, dusty bottles of alcohol, and other knickknacks that create the sensation of a musky, inescapable archive of the past. East of Berlin doesn’t offer a way out of the trap, but it certainly implies that time may be the only way to heal the deepest of wounds.
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