Benedict Nightingale
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Good to welcome Terry Hands, once the RSC's artistic director, back to London with a production that he staged at his Welsh redoubt, Clwyd Theatr Cymru, and then took to America. He certainly ensures that Jonathan Lichtenstein's tale of two walls and two ethnic calamities packs plenty of power. But when the play goes on to imply a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, one wonders if it isn't a bit, well, tendentious.
The evening begins with the cast preparing to rehearse Memory; the episodes that they then perform are occasionally interrupted by their own concerns; yet by the end this framing device is forgotten. All it seems to achieve is to tell us what we already know, that things such as making tea or repelling traffic wardens are pretty petty beside what happened in Germany in the 1930s and is occurring on the West Bank now.
There's nothing very original about the memories of Vivien Parry's doughty and generally excellent Eva as she grouchily meets her grandson in her East Berlin flat just after the fall of the Wall; but they still sicken you with their inevitability. Indeed, you may be reminded of Sophie's Choice at the climax of a story that starts with the Nazification of her Jewish husband's business partner and proceeds, via Kristallnacht, to his death and - but I'd better not reveal the fate of her children.
“It's nothing personal, I'm just following orders,” says Daniel Hawksford as that ex-partner before he blackmails Eve into having sex with him and then betrays her family. The same words come from Guy Lewis's Isaac, an Israeli official in the Bethlehem of 2007, as he warns Ifan Huw Dafydd's Bashar of the security wall about to crash through his ancestral home.
These orders are more regretfully delivered, and the 21st-century Palestinian is obviously in less pain than the 20th-century German Jew, but, Lichtenstein suggests, the wrong isn't dissimilar. Well, I'd take issue with thinking that comes close to equating eviction with murder, but then isn't it a playwright's job to prod, disconcert, stimulate? Terry Hands has always thought so - and so, I guess, do I.
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