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Memories
are for the keeping
I CAN CRY!
Pentameters Theatre
THE British historian David Irving is sitting in an Austrian
prison after pleading guilty to criminal charges of denying
the holocaust. He was jailed for three years in February for
his “revisionist” account of the Nazi regime in World
War II stating that gas chambers were a “fairytale”.
The Irving trial compelled Ester Holtzberg, a holocaust survivor,
to reach into the dark abyss of time and tell a story she had
kept under wraps for 60 years.
With her niece Miri Ben-Shalom as director, this documentary/play
relives every painful step. Real life stills and family photos
are projected onto the wall behind, evidence of her experience.
A young girl is caught up in the Nazi invasion. She treasures
her talking doll but quickly matures. Her name is Ester. Split
from her family she journeys through labour and concentration
camps. Reduced to nothing, she survives through fortune and
wit.
Emma Paterson, as the young Ester, performs while an older Ester
(Joy McBrinn) narrates from a chair center stage. Paterson must
be exhausted. Beaten and haggard, she appears dehumanized, walking
about like an animal, treated like a dog by her gun-toting Nazi
“superior”. Bodo Friesecke was excellent as the German
officer – after the show the transformation from militant
psychopath to a humble and courteous gentleman was testament
to his talents.
I Can Cry! brings no wry smiles. It is an exhausting evening
designed to scar the memory.
“The struggle of people against power,” wrote the
Czech novelist Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory
against forgetting.”
Holtzberg set out to make sure her struggles could not be forgotten.
The result is a keeper of memory.
Until April 8
020 7435 3648
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