Pascal Theatre Company Presents Reading of AS HAPPY AS GOD IN FRANCE

Pascal Theatre Company today announces the semi-staged reading of Julia Pascal's play, As Happy As God In France, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2023. The event will take place at Burgh House in Hampstead on 26 January, followed by a Q&A with the cast and Pascal herself.

As Happy As God In France reveals an unknown women's war history; a meeting between Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon, and Eva Daube in the French camp of Gurs in 1940. The play explores identity, morality and what it means to be a German Jewish stateless exile in the Holocaust's French antechamber, and will feature music by Flick Isaac-Chilton. The cast for this staged reading includes Giselle Wolf (Hannah Arendt), Caroline Wildi (Charlotte Salomon), Laura Wohlwend (Eva Daube), Leah Gayer (Trude Gottlieb) and Fiz Marcus (Agathe Blumenfeld).

Holocaust Memorial Day is held on 27 January each year, the date which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.

This event is supported by The Cockayne Foundation through the London Community Fund.

Julia Pascal says: "When I discovered that a cousin's aunt had been held in Gurs, and that she had been incarcerated with Hannah Arendt, I felt it imperative to dramatise this hidden history. This play honours those whose lives were stolen from them for the crime of being born a Jew."

As Happy As God In France is the ironic title which reveals a little-known incident in the life of Hannah Arendt.

In May 1940, the French government arrested thousands of German Jews who had fled Hitler for the presumed safety of France. Among them were 8000 women named Les Indésirables (the undesirables). This new play looks at what happened to Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon and Eva Daube as they faced imprisonment in the chaotic weeks between Armistice and Occupation. In Camp Gurs, they faced an ultimate life or death test as the Nazis moved south.

Using testimony from the family of Eva Daube, letters and archives from Hannah Arendt and the art of Charlotte Salomon, this drama explores an important French-German and American history that has been made invisible.

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