In her latest play writer/director Julia Pascal highlights a little-known yet harrowing period in the life of one of the most acclaimed intellectuals of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt.
In May 1940, the political and totalitarianism theorist was arrested in France with two other German-Jewish women, the painter Charlotte Salomon and Eva Daube, a young communist. Along with thousands of other Austrian and German refugees deemed “undesirable” by the state, they were sent to a desperately inhospitable internment camp in Gurs near the Spanish border. The detainees even included some Nazis, this being prior to the French-German armistice.
Pascal’s play with music, which is performed with intensity by an all-female six-strong cast, unflinchingly conveys the inhumane conditions in which as many as 60 detainees were crammed into each uninsulated, windowless and even bed-less wooden hut.
Pascal’s production deploys an array of theatrical devices to convey life – or more accurately existence and death - in the camp. One is an arresting score by composer/performer Anja Fahlenkamp whose choral music is rooted in the fear, anxiety and sheer incredulity of the women who have been dumped like neglected farm animals into camp.
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