Can we ever truly learn from history? This is the question hovering over Catherine Dyson’s The Last Picture – first shared in a rehearsed reading at York Theatre Royal as part of the RSC’s 37 Plays initiative in 2023 and now receiving a full production. It’s a piece that moves constantly between past and present, testing the empathic capacities and limits of theatre as an art form.
There’s a touch of Tim Crouch to Dyson’s writing, which invites the audience into the imaginative act of bringing her words to life. This is a play about pictures in which not a single image is shown. Addressed in the second person, we are cast as audience members in a theatre as well as a class of year 9 students on a school trip to an exhibition about the Holocaust. As the unseen photographic evidence of genocide is described, the play flings us backwards into the scenes captured, placing us in the position of those being led to their murders – as well as that of the neighbours who looked the other way.
Our guide throughout is the excellent Robin Simpson as Sam, the students’ emotional support dog. Radiating a comforting canine energy, Simpson talks us gently through the exhibition, periodically pausing to do a headcount and check how we’re feeling. John R Wilkinson’s absorbing production thrives on simplicity and space, allowing the storytelling and subtle shifts in lighting and sound to transport our imaginations – as well as leaving the gaps that expose where imagination and empathy fall short.
Though the play can’t resist closing on a note of hope, there’s nothing neat about The Last Picture’s take on history or humanity. If these images and the responses to them show us anything, it’s that we remain capable of it all: selflessness, brutality, compassion, indifference, kindness and atrocity alike.
