(Review of the production at the 2012 Witness Hilton Art
Festival by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Berlin 1945. The Russians are coming (and the Hilton weather
on Saturday afternoon was doing its bit for rumbling, banging sound effects).
An SS officer (James Cairns, who also wrote the piece) has picked up a young
actress (Taryn Bennett) whose father has managed to escape to the Americans,
coming in from the West. The officer was once a theatre critic, and he hopes he
can use this link with his captive to persuade her to tell him how her father
got out, information she obviously has, and therefore how he, and she, can do
likewise. (The title translates as She Knows Everything.)
Having explained to her that, unless they can do something
to help themselves, he faces certain death as a member of Hitler’s notorious
elite, even though he was just a pen-pusher, and she faces equally certain
rape, they play a game rehashing Hamlet’s scene with Ophelia where he famously
tells her: “Get thee to a nunnery.” It
is a scene which also contains the line: “Where is your father?” and as they
work through the possibilities of Shakespeare’s script, it begins to take on
first a sense of menace, and then one of hope.
The idea is good, and there is a leavening of humour, but I
did feel that the middle section, where Hamlet and Ophelia were being worked
over and over, would have been better for some tighter direction. Once or twice
I began to wish that the Russians would get a move on. But that aside, Cairns
and Bennett both deliver fine performances in what is an interesting work. -
Margaret von Klemperer
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