Elizabeth Hawrhorne as Stella Goldschlag in the play Blonde Poison.
Elizabeth Hawrhorne as Stella Goldschlag in the play Blonde Poison.
In an era when the slightest misdemeanour can trigger a tsunami of digital outrage, it is bracing to find a play that scrutinises the perilous horns of a very real moral dilemma and gently suggests self-examination might be more fruitful than condemnation.
Blonde Poison tells the story of an assimilatedGerman Jew, Stella Goldschlag, whose fierce will to survive leads her into whole-hearted co-operation with the Nazi's brutally efficient roundup of Jews in hiding from transportation to the death camps.
Elizabeth Hawthorne's performance hauntingly brings to life the unimaginable horror of living under a totalitarian regime bent on mass-murder. With sharp staccato phrases, she recreates the panicked response to a Gestapo raid on a forced-labour factory.
The psychological degradation of torture is evoked with stark poetic imagery and an eruption of raw emotion captures the anguish of a mother having her child ripped from her arms.
Playwright Gail Louw, whose grandparents were killed in the extermination camps, has created a nuanced script that highlights both the necessity and the impossibility of finding an appropriate artistic response to the Holocaust.
The dramatic tension emerges out of a self-interrogation in which false memories and justifications are jumbled together with confessions and grim reminders of historical facts.
The refusal of any easy delineation between victims and monsters is challenging though, at times, the multifarious shades of grey seem to obscure a subject that might be better served by the black and white of moral absolutes.
The newly formed Plumb Productions demonstrates an admirable commitment to the craft of theatre with Paul Gittens' razor-sharp direction complemented by the precision of John Parker's minimalist set in which a carefully placed mirror draws the audience into the question that lies at the heart of the drama - "What would you have done?"
What: Blonde Poison Where & When: Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre to Saturday, September 2 Reviewer: Paul Simei-Barton
