Adelaide Festival. Space Theatre.
Impeccable in their order and detail, they are spread right across the dun-coloured stage - rows of model buildings, lines of little barbed wire fences, and racks of tiny, drab people.
It's Auschwitz , fastidiously replicated in cardboard and plasticine.
The hideous world of its inmates is played out through three actors of the Dutch Hotel Modern company who move the models about to represent daily death camp chores from hefting sacks to cleaning the gas chambers. The puppet people are lined up, worked to death, exterminated and beaten, their actions filmed and projected on the wall to be witnessed by the audience - and also to be seen at all, for in reality on the stage, the scene is one of actors hunched over little sections of the set.
The action may be in miniature but the soundscape has a looming, booming oppressive quality - predominantly the sound of wind, sometimes a train, a clanking door, a shovel on the earth, sometimes the sound of a human being being beaten to a pulp. It echoes the awfulness of it all.
This production is a curiosity piece. In a voiceless scream of irony, it shrinks to playmat proportions a tale of man’s inhumanity to man, which remains so huge and terrible that the brain can barely comprehend it.
The little puppet people in their prison camp stripes have hideous little faces, expressions gouged in plasticine. They are all bald. Emaciated. Some stand on trays, paraded en masse for the guards in the yards. Others are depicted in individual action, none more heart-rending than their sucking down the last drop of soup.
There are no surprises. We all know the story. What is different is the scale and the very idea of making the holocaust into a toy world. That such a thing arrests attention and makes it onto the arts festival circuit is the good news - for it brings this shame of history before the eyes of a new generation.
Samela Harris
When: 12 – 17 Mar
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: www.bass.net.au
