At once savagely bitter and chirpily sweet, this show extracts a cruel fairytale from events of the Holocaust. From an armchair, Samantha Spiro (who took over when original actor Allan Corduner fell ill) reads us the tale of a father and a baby girl who survive Auschwitz at a terrible cost. Cellist Gemma Rosefield, seated on the other side of the stage, provides punctuating snatches of classical and Yiddish tunes and lullabies.
Produced to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan 27, it’s adapted by director Nicolas Kent from a novella by Parisian writer Jean-Claude Grumberg, who was born in 1939 and whose father and grandparents were murdered in extermination camps. If the sing-song cadences and simple repetitions of the narrative jar, the underlying message – that only love and a recognition of common humanity can save us – feels all the more urgent given the ongoing war in Gaza.
