A dark story told to maximum effect with the utmost simplicity
There is something extraordinarily powerful about simple storytelling. Although Samantha Spiro, the narrator of this story is actually addressing a packed theatre, it felt like she spoke directly to me as she began ‘Once upon a time…’.
The tale she tells is not a fairy story, although it does begin with a poor woodcutter’s wife finding ’the most precious of goods’, a helpless baby. Rather it is an evocation of the Holocaust, of lives lost and lives saved, the latter thanks to what Brecht described as ‘the temptation to do good’, in his own moral fable The Caucasian Chalk Circle, where another woman saves another infant from certain death.
The warmth of her voice belies the horrors in the tale she tells. The cosy armchair in which she is seated, wrapped in a shawl, stands on a cheerfully colourful rug, though the monochrome backdrop and side curtains are sober, sinister, even before you realise the numbers on the curtains evoke the numbers tattooed on the arms of concentration camp inmates. The screen behind her shows a spider-like tangle of snow-laden tree roots.
In an inspired coupling, Spiro is joined onstage by cellist Gemma Rosefield. Much of her music evokes Yiddish folk traditions, although this would have gone over the head of the woodcutter’s wife, who daily visits a spot in the woodlands worked by her husband, where a goods train slows down at the same time each morning. A train packed with passengers, who often manage to thrust notes into her hands, although the illiterate and hungry woman hopes against hope for something she can eat or use to buy food. Until one day she gets rather more than she could expect: a quivering, grizzling bundle wrapped in a shawl that wriggles in her arms.
Given that the tale is from eminent French Jewish writer Jean-Claude Grumberg, whose father and grandparents were deported from Paris to the camps in 1942, it is not surprising that his story reveals that this is a Jewish prayer shawl. We, the ‘onlookers’ (so vivid is the narrative that I could indeed ‘see’ it all), know the bleak truth of the train’s human ‘cargo’: those wartime goods trains with their barred windows, bound for death camps, returning empty to collect a new live load.
But in fairy-tale mode, we can guess that the one gift for which this woman longs is a child of her own, which her husband knows they cannot afford to raise. She knows little of Jews and their fate. She has been indoctrinated to call them ‘the heartless ones’, on whom she should blame all her woes. Now though, she finds she will fight for and on behalf of the longed-for precious gift of a baby girl.
Director Nicolas Kent, who is the son of a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, brings out the resonance of the story as we learn not only about the child, but about her family on the train and their unbearable choice. He intricately weaves the narrative strands and, against all the odds, the evening is filled with hope as well as threat; love and laughter as well as guilt.
As Spiro brought the tale to a close, I was spellbound enough to actually vocalise my response to a question she asked, as if it were addressed only to me as, in a way, it was… This pared down apparently simple monologue is one of the most effective Holocaust narratives I have ever seen on stage.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Beresford Hodge
The Most Precious of Goods runs until Saturday 3 February. 7.30pm, 1.30pm (Mon-Thu only), 3pm (Sat only). £21.50-£31.50. Marylebone Theatre, London, NW1 6XT. marylebonetheatre.com