Do we need more Holocaust dramas? Yes, for the same reason we need more love stories: the extremes of human experience have endless permutations, all worth exploring. But that’s exploring, not explaining. Probably only in Israel (where this play last toured) is there a more clued-up audience on twentieth-century Jewish suffering than at Hampstead’s New End theatre. This is not a reality that Kate Glover, who wrote ‘Judenfrei’ and also plays the monstrous mother who blocks her daughter’s escape, is prepared to acknowledge.
There’s a grim irony in representing two families’ inability or unwillingness to move via terrible acting where the actors are seemingly pinned to their respective spots, but I don’t think this is deliberate.
There’s no chemistry in the love story and no horror in their fate, which is quite a feat.
Worse, though, is the failure to convey the brave, foolish, heartbreakingly quixotic determination of Berlin’s Jews to be seen as what they considered themselves: Jewish Germans, members of the culture and of the cultural elite at that. To make that tragedy prosaic should be impossible, but Glover has managed it.