Big ideas are explored in a small space. David Lan’s play about children abducted from eastern Europe by the Nazis is being staged in the National’s most intimate venue, the Dorfman, yet thanks to Miriam Buether’s stunning traverse set, Stephen Daldry’s production has an epic sweep.
A living room and kitchen, masses of documents and even a forest are all squeezed into the auditorium as Lan’s script leaps back and forth across decades. As in Daldry’s recent offering about the Kyoto climate treaty, actors spill into the audience. If the occasionally baggy drama doesn’t quite justify a running time of nearly three hours, it’s held together by an imperious performance by Juliet Stevenson as Ruth, a UN relief worker in the shattered landscape of postwar Germany.
For his research, Lan — fondly remembered for his years at the helm of the Young Vic — drew on interviews with the late Gitta Sereny, the writer and Sunday Times journalist who joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, before going on to write her compelling books about Albert Speer and Treblinka’s commandant, Franz Stangl. At the centre of the over-padded narrative is Thomas, a boy who, because of his perfect “Aryan” features, is one of many children that the Nazis deemed suitable for being handed over to German families. When the piece opens, in 1990, we meet him as an adult (played by Tom Wlaschiha), a classical pianist who arrives at Ruth’s home, hoping to reconstruct fragments of the past. Should we assume Ruth is Sereny herself? After all, she too is a renowned author married to an American photographer. And Stevenson certainly evokes Sereny’s obsessive devotion to ferreting out the truth. Advertisement As she paces a floor that takes the form of a gigantic map, Ruth becomes her much younger self in Bavaria in 1945. Other children are all around us but we only hear their excited voices, thanks to Gareth Fry’s ghostly sound design. The young Thomas is there in flesh and blood, though, played with brio on the evening I went by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt. Is Ruth justified in removing him from the woman he loves as his mother? Russian and American troops have their own views about the children’s best interests too. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews Michael Fox and Caroline Loncq lead a sturdy supporting cast. Daldry adds set pieces, including a train journey to the east, which seem more suited to the big screen. But if Ruth’s relationship with the adult Thomas isn’t quite fully fleshed out, this is still a play that leaves you pondering uncomfortable issues of heritage and destiny. And given how many Ukrainian children are reported to have been taken to Russia in the past few years, these are not just questions about the distant past.
★★★☆☆
165min
To Nov 1, nationaltheatre.org.uk
