Prestige theatre doesn’t come more prestigious than Stephen Daldry directing Juliet Stevenson in a new play by David Lan, former Artistic Director of the Young Vic, about the children displaced by Nazi Germany.
Based on eyewitness accounts of those tasked with rehoming them at the end of World War 2, they also discovered a horrific secret programme had snatched Aryan-presenting ones from occupied countries. They were medically tested and, if they passed, adopted into German families, so indoctrinated they forgot their true identities. Those that failed were worked to death in factories and thrown in mass graves.
Decades later, Stevenson’s fictional UN aid worker Ruth is confronted at home by the one boy with whom she had a special connection, who furiously demands “Why?”
Flitting back and forth in time between the angrily anguished adult Thomas (Game of Thrones star Tom Wlaschiha) and the equally tormented child (an astonishing Artie Wilkinson-Hunt on opening night) we slowly piece together what his question actually refers to.
At its core, it’s a gripping, powerful story where morality and memory are constantly challenged, and often found wanting, while buried truths bring little peace.
With Germany divided between the Brits, French, Americans and Russians, some saw the children as easy pickings to help repopulate their own countries and provide future labour – and it wasn’t just the initially cartoon villain Russians.
Elegantly mounted, with the raised traverse stage sitting on stacks of filing boxes and cabinet, the superb ensemble constantly rushes on and off, playing multiple roles in multiple languages. It all adds to the urgency and sense of desperate chaos, but ultimately it is all too frantic. Confrontations are often repetitive, both in the past and present.
There are moments of great drama, but, fundamentally, it is far too long and rather overwritten at times, blunting its impact, even when the climactic answer to Thomas’ question is devastatingly not what we had assumed.
LANDING OF THE LIVING AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE TO NOVEMBER 1