Theatre / Reviews
Review: Seder, Tobacco Factory Theatres – ‘A tender, thought-provoking, angry and poignant performance’
More than two years on, and with the thinnest eggshell of a ceasefire just about holding, what are we to make of the horror inflicted upon Israelis by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent response by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Force – a response that cost almost 73,000 Palestinian lives?
Suffice to say – and treading carefully with words here – that the question is incredibly vexed, not least among Jewish people whose memories of the Holocaust, lived or otherwise, still weigh heavily down the generations.
Such dilemmas and the angst they provoke are tackled – lightly, in many respects, but no less powerfully – by poet and interdisciplinary artist Adam Kammerling. His multidisciplinary piece Seder uses storytelling, movement and music to examine what it means to be Jewish, and to carry an inheritance of fear while simultaneously pushing against it to absorb and understand the outrage felt by so many at the destruction in Gaza.
Seder (named after a traditional act of remembrance held at Passover) explores Kammerling’s personal inheritance (a grandfather who arrived in England on the Kindertransport, great-grandparents who perished in Auschwitz) and wraps it into his own feelings around the various narratives that have circulated since the Gaza conflict began.
He understands what the Jewish fight for survival means; he also acknowledges the trauma of the Palestinian people and, in a wide-ranging work that takes us from the Nazi death camps to a punk festival, via regular runs around London and even a kids’ birthday party, attempts to give some shape to the conflicting voices that swirl around us all.
Kammerling is a likeable, affable and often funny performer which, ironically, adds even more weight to the seriousness of the issues he narrates. The multidisciplinary aspect of this performance is represented beautifully by percussionist Antosh Wojcik and harpist Marysia Osu, plus physical artists Si Rawlinson, Elisabeth Mulenga and Jay Yule, whose subtle movement and timing highlight the alternate anger and poignancy of the whole piece.
“Fear,” Kammerling says, “is shutting us down”, and in a week where an overt, murderous form of 21st century fascism stalks the very country that did so much to liberate Europe from that evil eight decades ago, his words take on a horrible, prescient irony. Seder is a tender, thought-provoking work that deliberately doesn’t howl in protest – yet is all the more angry for that.
Seder is at Tobacco Factory Theatres on January 27-28 at 7.30pm. Tickets are available at www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com.
Main photo: Tobacco Factory Theatres
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