Here There Are Blueberries - Review

Stratford East, London

****

By Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich

Conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman

The cast of Here There Are Blueberries

Only on for two more weeks in this the play’s UK premiere, Here There Are Blueberries is a compelling and chilling history lesson.

The play is a tough 90-minute one-act drama inspired by a collection of photographs, all snapshots rather than formally posed images, and all taken at Auschwitz concentration camp in the final months before its liberation, that were discovered towards the end of the 20th century.

Moisés Kaufman conceived the play on learning of the photographs’ existence, and it is a cleverly conceived presentation of the images that drives the evening, delivering a chilling comment on the society that allowed its antisemitism to fuel the industrialised slaughter that defines the Holocaust. Technically ingenious, the creative team’s digital wizardry has breathed a gruesome vivacity into the projections of these authentic images from the 1940s.

Not until the play’s final paragraphs do we witness any images of the victims of Auschwitz. Rather, throughout the drama, we observe the SS leadership of the concentration camp and their assistants, who went about their murderous work with the detached air of any corporate management team. The titular blueberries refer to an image of the camp’s communication corps, a bevy of teenage girls perched on a fence at Solahütte, an SS holiday lodge on the perimeter of the Auschwitz camp, grinning as they eat bowls of the fruit.

And that is the essence of this piece - the sheer normality, the banality of those who individually were 'ordinary people' but who, when in collaboration, could wreak such horror on the Jews of Europe. Before they had joined the SS, we learn that the camp’s officers had been accountants, confectioners, bank clerks or such like, many coming from Germany’s professional classes. 

Much of the play’s narrative is verbatim theatre, drawn from meticulously researched interviews with not only survivors of Auschwitz, but also a number of grandchildren of the SS criminals who commanded the camp and who appear in the photos.

The evening’s most chilling revelation  comes from Tilman Taube (played by Clifford Samuel). Taube’s grandfather was Dr. Heinz Baumkötter, an SS doctor responsible for atrocities in a number of the Nazis’ concentration camps.

Late in the play, we learn from Taube that before Baumkötter died, he had said to his grandson, “with a twinkle in his [Baumkötter’s] eye”, that his time briefly in Auschwitz, but primarily in Saschenhausen concentration camps, implementing Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question, had been “the best years of his life”.

That vile comment alone makes Here There Are Blueberries essential theatre.

Runs until 7th March

Photo credit: Mark Senior