Review: AS LONG AS WE ARE BREATHING, Arcola Theatre

I’m not sure if it’s the impact of hours of increasing numbness at Auschwitz in 1989, the terrible beauty of Primo Levi’s prose or seeing, on television, by chance and unprepared, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, that has closed off any further emotional response to Holocaust stories. It’s a strange feeling of displaced shock and horror - I have nothing left for those frightened faces in grainy black and white photos, the seam is fully excavated, but there is something different, something of which I would like to think Miriam Freedman might approve.

This is her story, crafted by Diane Samuels and performed by Caroline Gruber as the older Miriam, Zoe Goriely as the younger (called Eva then, her German name that proved the most flimsy of shields)  and Matthew James Hinchliffe, whose music promotes the movement and emotions so central to the story’s telling. 

We’re greeted by Gruber (in character) setting the play up as a conversation in a shared space, an approach that extends to the dialogue that sparks between the innocent kid and the wise woman. We know it’s the same person, we cannot mistake that energy and attitude! 

After learning of Miriam’s lifelong passion for yoga, partly as an outlet for her sportiness and partly to address the impact of years spent hunched up, hiding in small spaces, a terrifyingly familiar Mitteleuropa tale plays out. The rise of Nazi-adjacent politics; the condoning/encouraging of pogroms; the confiscation of property; cruel displacement and separation; surprise raids and silent hours with jackboots outside; finally, the trains and the selections and the never-seen-agains.

Through it all, we do not lose the spirit of the girl who wasn’t welcomed to play with the blue-eyed kids in 1930s Bratislava, the brightness that shone inside her as her family (director, Ben Caplan, represents them with flowers) becomes smaller and smaller. We see the power of defiance, not just from those with black eyes, but also those with blue eyes, who risked their lives to do good in the face of evil, finding cellars for children and misdirecting the secret police demanding to inspect. 

The play ends on a sentiment that reflects the Rilke quote at the end of Taika Waititi’s magnificent Jojo Rabbit - "Let everything happen to you / Beauty and terror / Just keep going / No feeling is final." 

Except it doesn’t end there - not for me anyway. 

A word poked at my mind, a word I fear as much as any in either of the two languages I love. 

Untermensch.

That I was thinking about its hideous power resonating through the play as I travelled home was no surprise; that I realised that I had been thinking about that very word two hours earlier as I travelled in, was a shock. 

It is not for me to appropriate any element of the unique trauma of The Holocaust and apply it as a metaphor - that is for Miriam and those carrying its burden today - but it is for me, and people like me, to listen, to learn and to act on what we see now. The testimony of As Long As We Are Breathing demands that we must.     

As Long As We Are Breathing at The Arcola Theatre until 1 March

Photo images: Lidia Crisafulli

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