If writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, as the philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said, how about a fairytale? Can the consoling archetypes of a simple story address the Shoah? That’s the challenge in this evening drawn from a 2019 novella by Jean-Claude Grumberg, a rapt piece of storytelling delivered by Samantha Spiro.
Spiro settles on a faded armchair, opens up a big red story book and begins: “Once upon a time.” Here is a wintry forest, a childless woodcutter and his wife, a baby separated from her twin and raised as another’s. It might all lead to happy ever after if it wasn’t for the unyielding context. A train passes the forest, speeding French Jews to a concentration camp. The baby is flung from the train by her father in a desperate bid to save her. The woodcutter’s wife must protect this most precious bundle against an antisemitic husband, snooping neighbours and callous military.
Translation and direction are by Nicolas Kent, best known for tribunal plays based on inquiries into Stephen Lawrence’s murder, Bloody Sunday and the Grenfell Tower fire. They favour stark fact and plain staging: in a different key, this piece does the same. Beside Carly Brownbridge’s stage design, strewn with dead leaves, silhouettes of bare trees are built from rows of serial numbers, like those tattooed on prisoners in the camps. The most theatrical flourish is the accompaniment by cellist Gemma Rosefield: her own music is sombre and spiky, but over-familiar melodies also stipple the piece.
Spiro, her voice crackling and confiding, her eyes beetle-dark with worry, conducts us through the tale with terrible urgency. She weaves together the naive tropes and bleak horrors of Grumberg’s tale, from the wife radiantly welcoming the baby to the father’s terrible action: “don’t choose, don’t think.”
Spiro is leaving the stage when she turns back, as if responding to a question. Is this a true story? “No, not at all.” How could this cruel parental decision and so monstrous a context be true: “no ash, no tears, nothing.” A projection appears after the curtain call, detailing what happened to France’s Jews and Grumberg’s own family. You want truth? Here it is.
• At Marylebone theatre, London, until 3 February.
