Exploring Auschwitzs Dark Side Through Staff Photos

Here There Are Blueberries (Theatre Royal, Stratford East)

Verdict: The banality of evil

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The Battle ( Rep)

Verdict: The banality of Britpop

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The excuse that those involved in the Holocaust were just following orders was seen as part of what the American historian Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’.

Now a harrowing but salutary new show recharges that maxim in a compelling docudrama conceived by Moises Kaufman. It takes up the story of how an album of photographs showing Nazi staff relaxing in Auschwitz was sent by an anonymous donor in 2007 to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

Life carrying on as normal, next to industrialised mass murder, was also the subject of The Zone Of Interest, the 2023 film about Auschwitz architect Rudolf Hoss and his family.

Kaufman takes the title of his show, Here There Are Blueberries, from a caption in the photo album, below a shot of secretaries eating berries in a purpose-built holiday resort near the death camp.

In another photo we see SS officers gathered for an accordion-led sing-a-long. Later, we learn they are celebrating the murder of 350,000 Hungarian Jews over the previous two months.

So far, so awful. And yet this compendium, compiled by Karl Hocker, the adjutant to the camp’s final commandant, Richard Baer, holds vital historical evidence, too. It contains the only image placing the notorious ‘doctor’ Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

Analysis of the photographs becomes a riveting, if disturbing, detective story, presented with a neutrality that allows the facts to speak for themselves.

The projected photos take centre stage, with figures and faces highlighted, while actors play the team of archivists and others involved in the museum’s investigation.

Philippine Velge brings clarity and dignity as the young researcher who receives the photos, before also telling the story of an Auschwitz survivor who arrived at the camp on the same day as Hocker (a career accountant, tracked down and tried in old age).

The compassion of those involved in the search for justice brings hope amid the horror, and stops the 90-minute story from being unbearable.

For this we must be grateful, because it’s a story that needs to be told, again and again.

By stark contrast, The Battle espouses the banality of Britpop, revisiting the lad-mag culture of Cool Britannia, as Blur and Oasis go nose to coke-snuffling nose in a fight to top the UK charts in the summer of ’95.

Someone stupidly jokes it’s like ‘Israel versus Palestine’. But in reality, novelist John Niven’s fatuous stand-off is a pointless, two-hour ten-minute slurry of f-ing and c-ing.

Top of the potty mouths is Oasis’s Liam Gallagher (George Usher): shown as a vile, hair-trigger homophobe so thick he thinks Freddie Mercury ‘invented AIDS’.

Brother Noel (Paddy Stafford) is contemptuous of him but no less steeped in the oikish sexism of the period, describing a female interviewer from The Observer as having a ‘face like a pickled f***ing duck’.

Damon Albarn (Oscar Lloyd) is an intellectual snob, who cajoles his mild-mannered guitarist Graham Coxon (Will Taylor) into making an inane Benny Hill style music video.

The supposedly hilarious loutishness of Matthew Dunster’s production features poor sightlines on Fly Davis’s bland set, with cartoon projections of DJs, including Chris Evans and Danny Baker, between scenes.

And a vaguely amusing finale doesn’t mitigate a tasteless, machete-wielding climax. Much like the Nineties, we’re better off out of it.

Here There Are Blueberries runs until March 7; The Battle is at Birmingham Rep until March 7, then Manchester Opera House from March 17-21.

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry (Theatre Royal, Haymarket)

Verdict: One for the road

Rating:

First a radio play, then a novel, then a movie, Rachel Joyce’s story about inexpressible grief is now a musical with a score and lyrics by folk singer and songwriter, Passenger (aka Mark Rosenberg).

Having never joined this pilgrimage in any its earlier iterations, it took me a while to get into my stride.

Mark Addy’s Harold is a glum lump of a man: not a talker and certainly not a walker.

Yet, when he gets a note from Queenie, a woman he met in the stationery cupboard decades ago (yes, you’re meant to raise a quizzical eyebrow), telling him she is dying, he starts walking to the hospice in Berwick on Tweed. From Devon.

It feels like ridiculous whimsy. Harold is wearing boat shoes, and has said nothing to his sad wife Maureen (Jenna Russell, deeply moving as the one left behind).

Some terrible tragedy has driven them apart. But an unearthly elfin creature, wearing a wreath of leaves (a beguiling Noah Mullins) is urging Harold on.

As is a shop assistant with blue hair, belting out a gospel song: ‘You can walk upon the water, go on and set yourself free.’

Each number in Katy Rudd’s stirring production pushes the story forward, deepening our involvement.

‘The art of getting lost is the key to being found,’ sings the farmer’s wife, widowed young.

Bruised, blistered, abandoned by the flakey groupies who have joined him (even the show-stealing dog puppet), Harold trudges on.

Addy’s Harold sings little more than a line or two until almost the end, when the floodgates of grief burst. Well worth the journey.

Until April 18.

GEORGINA BROWN