I watched ‘Theresa‘ at St James, St Peter Port, Guernsey. The location readers, is important. Because some 25 years after it was initially written by Julia Pascal, a UK based Jewish playwright, it was finally performed in Guernsey – the location where many of the narratives took place.
For the first time, no re-writes, just the semi-staged rehearsed reading original play. Its purpose being as a dedication to the memory of Theresa Steiner, who was gassed in Auschwitz in October 1942, plus also to bring to light more narratives of occupation for the Channel Islands.
It’s based on Ms Pascals research into the island’s occupation by the Nazis and the events leading up to how Jews were expelled. It’s the story of one woman born in Vienna, a ‘European Jew’, as she says in the play, who died in Aushwitz.
On Monday night St James was a buzz pre-performance with people from all over the globe, visiting the island especially to see the play.
Told in a series of short scenes with four actors on stage, one being the pianist, they juggled fragments of French, German and Polish within a predominantly English script.
The play is a masterpiece of how skilled actors can convey a wide range of characters through tone of voice and changes of expression and accent.
The play opens with Steiner dancing a Viennese waltz; ‘The Blue Danube’ by Strauss to be exact. The audience is then taken through the sequence of events that led Steiner to go from being a professor of Music in the famed Vienna Music Conservatory to being a nanny in England, a ‘domestic’, to then being a nurse at the Castel Hospital in Guernsey.
This scene however, is called ‘The Lesson’ and it is Steiner giving her final lecture to students. For me, it was one of the most poignant scenes of the play. It’s the part where we get insight into Steiner’s thinking, how she and indeed many Jews were reacting to what was happening to them.
In this scene, one of Steiner’s French students, Esther Jacobson, explains that she has a Jewish Grandmother and is from France, is deemed a Jew and is planning on fleeing to Palestine and urges Steiner to do the same, citing ‘It’s the only place we can be safe’, saying her lack of Hebrew won’t be a problem, and they can get access illegally if needs be if the British don’t allow it.
This is the scene that for me encompassed exactly what I can imagine so many Jews grappled with.
That Europe was their home, and that ‘the little man with the moustache’, again a line that comes up in a later scene, called Kristallnacht The Night of the Broken Glass, was wanting to eradicate them. Theresa’s student even points out and tells her she thinks she is being naive. It’s this part of the play which stood out to me, that leaving for the Middle East was a last resort.
Throughout the play Pascal used music to convey her messages. But also there are a rail or clothes on the stage. These are props for ‘The Night of the Broken Glass’ scene. Here Pascal portrays with brutal clarity just what deportation looked like for 20th century Jews. The impact of the Nuremburg Race Relations Act being enforced. That people were made to flee with just the clothes on their back. That no Jew could fathom the horrors of what was happening in the concentration camps, and that fleeing to the Middle East and believing in the development of State of Israel was in many Jews eyes their only option.
The play then used narrative and music to show Steiner’s journey from Vienna to London.
We have a particular scene in The Savoy Hotel, London 1939, which really portrays the nuances of Society in London during the war. Steiner talks to a bell boy, they converse about their former lives as Professor of Music and he as Professor of Architecture at Berlin University. That the colour of one’s skin and race is the only divider of standing in Society. It’s poignant, but shows the daily humiliations of what life was like for the Jews, but also their awareness of the humiliation and how they reacted to it…within this scene, to me, with dignity.
The latter or final scenes are in Guernsey, and indeed where we see war time St Peter Port as a backdrop on the stage. For some this is where the facts of her story can hit too close to home. We see the threat of German invasion coming to Guernsey and the characters she meets. By now Steiner has moved to Wiltshire and is working as a nanny for a gentile English woman and her children. Chamberlain’s declaration of the beginning of the war, the threat of Hitler and the Blitz being near; her upper class employer announces they’ll go to the Channel Islands, saying “ Don’t worry, they’re safe. They’re British. We’ll all be safe there.”
What follows is the steps leading up to Steiner’s deportation.
Pascal uses historical research to show us that people not local to the island were given the choice to leave. So Theresa’s employer chooses just that, she leaves with her children to go back to England, but Theresa is forced to stay by a local Guernsey police officer. Although already an ‘enemy alien’ in England, he insists that her ‘enemy alien’ status be used as reason to make her stay in Guernsey.
Pascal has chosen to portray Theresa’s fellow nurses in Castel hospital and brings to life what occupation must have been like for locals, the fear and everyday life experience for many. What follows is the nuances of friendship mixed with fear, mixed with unconscious bias …the prejudice or stereotype individuals hold about certain groups of people that they aren’t consciously aware of having.
I woke up today needing comfort before writing this review.
I listened to the Beatles ‘Let it be’ over and over, as the issues this play raises are distressing, but important.
The Channel Islands were the only British soil to have deported people to death camps. Fact.
Pascal’s play uses contemporaneous research and artistic license to tell the story. It’s a stirring piece of theatre acted with intensity and watching it in Guernsey will stay with you forever.
The play is written and directed by Julia Pascal. The Assistant Director is Conrad Cohen. The cast include Fiz Marcus, Michal Horowitz and Milo Maris.The composer and sound designer is Flick Isaac Chilton.
