Vilaine Rouge: "Shalom" staged a play about theater in the ghetto

The red curtain, live music, festive glitter, and behind it gray barracks made of rough planks, hunger and death are both the scenery for a new play at the Shalom Theater and the reconstructed atmosphere of the Vilnius ghetto. Director Vladimir Kimmelman armed himself with a play by the modern Israeli playwright Yeshua Sobol, who, in turn, used the real diaries of one of the prisoners to present the viewer with a soothing and at the same time terrifying picture with songs and dances. Izvestia attended the premiere.

Is there a place for a theater in a cemetery?

The play "Ghetto" is based on a play by the Israeli playwright Yeshua Sobol, written in 1984 based on documents and memoirs of prisoners of the Vilna ghetto, including librarian and chronicler Herman Kruk. This is the story of a real theater that existed in occupied Vilnius during the Second World War. The premiere of the production took place two months after the Germans killed 50,000 of the 70,000 prisoners. The story is so incredible that it is easy to succumb to the temptation to turn it into a parable about the triumph of art over death.

But Vladimir Kimmelman does not give an obvious conclusion. Here, the theater does not save everyone, does not abolish cruelty and does not give the characters a reliable moral refuge. On the one hand, he briefly gives them the opportunity to manage their own lives. On the other hand, it raises the question: is a theater possible where everything around has turned into a cemetery?

The director defined the genre as a tragedy with songs and dances. The performance begins against the background of a scarlet curtain. At first, it looks festive, but under harsh German shouts and military appeals, its color begins to be perceived as bloody. In the course of the action, a full-fledged cabaret takes place on stage. Actors play the double bass, accordion, piano and drums, actresses dance in revealing outfits, act out sketches. The play swings from the comic to the scary, from drama to farce. And it's getting harder to believe in the reality of what's happening.

Although the Vilna Theater did not exist in a metaphorical space, but in the specific circumstances of the Nazi occupation. He was a part of the cultural life of the ghetto, but at the same time a part of the world in which the Nazi regime determined the price of human life.

In Kimmelman's production, this ambivalence is sometimes lost behind an abundance of scenic means. It seems that the play is afraid to leave the viewer alone with the question and therefore constantly offers a new number, a new image, a new emotional twist.

The diabolical entertainer

Nikolai Saker has the strongest acting job, playing Tunic, a German officer on whom the lives of ghetto residents depend. His character does not look like the usual stage villain, who from the first appearance informs the public about his own monstrosity. Saker created the image of a man capable of changing masks with frightening ease. He combines courtesy, artistic enthusiasm, mockery, and a cold willingness to send prisoners to their deaths.

The tunic does not look alien to the art world. His prototype, SS Obercharfuhrer Bruno Kitel, once graduated from a theater school in Berlin. He could be the patron saint of the stage, a charming conversationalist, and the next minute shoot people with his right hand while his left was playing a melody on the piano.

Saker Falcon definitely caught this fickleness. In the form of a demonic entertainer, he entertained the audience with a stand in several languages, and then sent hundreds of prisoners to their deaths in Ponars.

An equally controversial character is Jacob Gens, the head of the Judenrat and the head of the Jewish police. Trying to save at least some of the prisoners, he sought to reduce the number of those condemned to death. In his terrible arithmetic, 700 victims were preferable to two thousand. To protect children from large families from being destroyed, he gave them to those who raised only one child. But at the same time, the General was following orders from the German authorities, becoming part of a system that he was trying to fight with the means available to him. Anton Schwartz convincingly conveys this moral duality, without slipping into either pathos or unambiguous assessments.

The coordinated work of the entire stage staff is felt. Nikolai Balatsky, Olga Prikhodchenko, Elena Bobrovskaya, Sofia Neznamova and Alyona Kormilitsyna had to jump between images and at the same time remain faceless. Therefore, at times the artists found themselves hostages to the general theatrical ingenuity.

Still, "Ghetto" is a must—see performance. This is not a dispute between a prudent pragmatist and an impeccable moralist. Both positions exist within the catastrophe, where it is impossible to remain unsullied. Art doesn't have to be comforting to make sense. It does not guarantee survival and does not make suffering noble. It may turn out to be a way of earning money, an opportunity to forget for a while, the last space of freedom.

Do we need a theater in the ghetto? The play addresses this question to both the characters and the audience. And it is impossible to answer it from a safe distance. While the audience is trying to comprehend what they have seen, the boards of the barracks collapse under a deafening roar — the last reminder of those who lived there. Meanwhile, the names of dozens of death camps change on the screen.