Amsterdam

by Maya Arad Yasur translated by Eran Edry

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 10 October 2019

Matthew Xia directs Daniel Abelson, Fiston Barek, Michal Horowicz and Hara Yannas in a production designed by Naomi Kuyck-Cohen of Amsterdam, a play which explores facets of Jewish consciousness and experience during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and in the present day. The rosy picture of Dutch resistance to Nazi anti-semitism is confounded by individual acts of betrayal; the prevalence of modern anti-semitism is complicated by the possible paranoia of a visiting Israeli violinist as she negotiates living in Amsterdam and coping with an insensitive bureaucracy. The two themes are linked by the fact that Dutch Jews returning to their properties after the Second World War (those that were able to) were presented with utility bills (including gas bills) unpaid in their absence, when these properties had often been used by occupying forces. The Israeli visitor, renting a flat, is presented with a bill plus penalties and interest, amounting to 1700 euros, unpaid for decades by the titular landlady, whom she never meets.

The actors present these stories through a discursive method of  discovery, rather than through conventional dramatic action. Thus, none of them plays a specific character; where short scenes are played out, the roles are taken up as required and then immediately dropped. The revelations of what may be presumed to have happened are not enmeshed in an Arthur Miller-like ratcheting of tension. Instead, the actors assert a possible scenario, contradict one another in order to refine it, and then,apparently agreeing on the basic facts, extrapolate from there. Thus we only gradually learn who is renting the flat, who lives upstairs, what happened seventy-five years ago, what the inexplicable gas bill signifies. On a stage of bright yellow linoleum, with at first only a chair in one corner, every scenic detail and social custom must be painted by words, and all four actors provide a torrent of them, asserting, qualifying, arguing, circling the acting space, creating a running commentary and occasionally dipping into the presumed thoughts of one or another character. Dutch expressions which frequently escape them require the speaker to take a time-out, as it were, to use a microphone to translate the foreign words.

It's a dizzying experience to watch, as normal stage conventions are flouted or set aside in favour of a seemingly relentless tide of scene-setting. One gathers that the modern protagonist is heavily pregnant (there's an appointment with an obstetrician), and that she fears that almost everyone she meets regards her as an interloper and probably a Muslim refugee. If the anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic and misogynistic remarks we hear are 'real', that is disturbing enough; if they are partly the product of her over-heated imagination, they reveal an alarming level of self-loathing - or maybe they are a deeply uncomfortable reminder that a lifetime of wariness about prejudice is a monumental burden on the mind.

One has only to look back at the convoluted story of resistance, collaboration, thwarted passion and the temptation to bargain with the devil to see that the poison then, virulent as it was, was horribly insidious and not easily drained away. As we move to concentrate more on the older story, a desk on a small rostrum appears, to be used both for the modern bureaucrat insisting that debts must be paid, and for the official of the older time. A wall of small chains is raised symbolising both division and concealment, but also captivity and deportation. Several possible endings are discarded by the voices of the actors; the situation as finally revealed is both intractable and enigmatic.

At an uninterrupted eighty minutes, there is a great deal to be taken in, and alert attention is constantly required to keep up, to follow the refinements and qualifications to the heart of the two stories and to see how the older affects the newer. But I'm glad that not all plays are made like this.