Review: A Good Jew, Alma Tavern Theatre

The horrors of Nazi Germany are impossible to comprehend in totality. Theatre and literature provide perhaps our best chance of comprehending representative examples of individual tragedy and digesting themes that enable us to process at least in part the extent of the suffering that took place. In Something Underground’s production of A Good Jew at The Alma this week, the focus is on the improbable story of one extended family – and on the issues of self-preservation, identity and blame during the Holocaust.

The opening scene is extremely strong and embodies one of the greater qualities of Jonathan Brown’s play: the retrospectively unfathomable persistence of normality in the face of wholescale catastrophe, brought to life through otherwise unremarkable details of ordinary life.

As the audience files in, a table is set out with unfinished food and wine, and the players (Daniel Grimston, Isabella McCarthy Sommerville, Simon Hellyer and David Stephens as Gustav and Kurt Gerron) expertly enter the stage and spring into the liveliness of a well-enjoyed family meal with wholly convincing animation, before the wholescale deterioration taking place beyond the apartment’s windows rears its head through increased references to the victims of the Nazis’ intensifying racial psychosis.

The scene, like much else in the play, represents a compelling parable for how a country and its citizens experience catastrophe. There is no single moment when smiles turn to furrowed brows; when our quotidian preoccupations with fresh bread, fine wine, stolen kisses or good music turn to a wholescale fixation on survival, starvation and mass slaughter.

Outsiders are harassed, but they are of course at first isolated incidents. The international community disapproves; but then the conspiracy at hand is after all largely their work. Poverty and hunger increase; but this merely vindicates the rationale of those determined to wrench society apart. Slowly at first, and then very rapidly, the unfathomable becomes unexceptional and, as seen through the stories of both hero and villain, it is too late for many to escape through anything other than extraordinary and often cruel acts of self-protection or denial.

The Franks, we hear, have eloped to Amsterdam: and this mention of Anne’s family illustrates Brown’s other great quality; weaving his well-researched narrative around recognisable reference points that help set each scene, despite slightly incessant incidents of drama, become more convincing. The most jarring example of this is the inclusion of the story of the Theresienstadt propaganda film; directed and performed by Jewish victims and intended to fool the world over their abject standards of living and near certainty of their deaths.

Life at the Terezín camp really did have a cultural emphasis that was absent at others, with music, poetry and performance tolerated and even encouraged. In the play, this again helps bring forward a theme of the continuation of other aspects of human life despite the all-powerful malevolence consuming the continent, even if they have deteriorated through the play’s course into a wholly grotesque and tragic form. There are even moments of murder and rape accompanied by frolicsome music and the mannerisms of silent movie slapstick: scenes that are very difficult to digest.

Nevertheless, through some excellent spells of dialogue and solid performances, the play most often deals with these weighty subjects with sufficient respect, although at times if feels like the complicity of some Jews in the fate of others receives a disproportionate amount of stage time compared to the unmitigated culpability that should be assigned the Nazis themselves, even when this moral relativism is voiced by SS members. The production does, though, contribute to our understanding of how the most overbearing atmosphere of malevolent coercion ensured that it took a real hero to say merely ‘no’. A Good Jew is well worth catching during the rest of its run in Bristol or beyond.

A Good Jew continues at the Alma Tavern Theatre until Saturday, July 2. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.almataverntheatre.co.uk/theatre/what-s-on