Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Alisa Palmer
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
October 24-November 25, 2007
What would you do if you found out your father was a Nazi war criminal? That’s the question posed by Hannah Moscovitch’s new play East of Berlin now receiving its world premiere at the Tarragon. This is not a question with an easy answer and Moscovitch’s fascinating play is far more ambiguous than director Alisa Palmer allows it to be.
Rudi (Brendan Gall) has grown up in a German enclave in Paraguay, where high-ranking Nazis had been resettled to escape detection. Remarkably incurious, Rudi has never questioned his father’s account of what he did in the war or even why as Germans they live in South America. When schoolfriend Hermann (Paul Dunn) tells him the truth, Rudi flees to Germany to escape from his parents and to learn more about his father’s crimes. Moscovitch shows Rudi in three guises, as a tortured soul in the present, as bumbling teenager and young man and as the awkward narrator of his story who speaks directly to the audience. Moscovitch tries rather in vain to have Rudi-as-narrator leaven his grim story with humour.
The main difficulty is that Gall does very little to distinguish these three personae who all seem to be the clueless 17-year-old Rudi. This is important because one of the play’s themes is the manipulation of truth and people to satisfy the ego. Palmer never has Gall bring out the darker side of Rudi, who manipulates us as audience as much as he manipulates Hermann or Sarah (Diana Donnelly), the Jewish woman he marries. Palmer and Gall portray these events as accidental even when Moscovitch’s text says outright that they may be intentional. Palmer seems to want to have Rudi blindly walk into a kind of recapitulation of his father’s life, when Moscovitch’s play is more complex than that.
Donnelly and Dunn do excellent work at making their sketchy secondary characters come alive often with a sense of greater substance than Gall’s Rudi. Camellia Koo’s great set masterfully captures the theme of the malign influence of the past by showing us musty antiquarian library shelves that thrust stage-leftwards into the darkness. Moscovitch is a fine storyteller even if she occasionally veers into melodrama. Her narrator would be even more effective if our feelings about him were mixed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-10-26.
Photo: Brendan Gall and Diana Donnelly. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2007-10-26
East of Berlin