Company of Angels - The Story of Charlotte Salomon

presented by
Horse + Bamboo Theatre Company
at The Dukes, Lancaster,
Saturday 10 May 2003
reviewed by Satori

From the outset we realised that something special was happening here - when even the stage furniture has choreography and charisma that completely engaged me. There is a focus and an intensity to this performance that was gripping throughout.

We first met Charlotte and her family as they emerge from the furniture in their character masks. The whole action of the play is carried out in mime and symbolic imagery, to music with occasional voice-overs at key moments. Her relationship with her mother was most beautifully portrayed, showing their similarity and closeness, with movement and feeling that was touching. I realise here that I'm about to have a problem with reviewing this work - the words 'beautiful' and 'moving' will be needed in almost every sentence. And even then I won't be able to convey how I felt.

Of course it's personal too. I'm an ex-Israeli (non-jewish) who returned to the UK when my peacenik president was assassinated by right-wing fundamentalists who took over the country and have carried out an accelerating programme of atrocity, torture and murder on Palestinians, continuously using the Holocaust as an excuse and justification for their position. This is what the Holocaust has become in the Israeli consciousness - an excuse, a get out of jail free card for their sons and daughters to carry into 'battle' and their politicians and apologists to wear as a shield at the negotiating table. I became sick to death of hearing about the holocaust - because every time it was used to justify some evil, some horror.

My jewish friend had been jailed for refusing to shoulder arms. Political re-education was deemed necessary and in due course a re-educator came to the prison to lecture him and his fellow criminals. A camp survivor as a child she talked again about the horrors she had seen and asked him how could he refuse to serve his country and defend his people from those who would imprison and enslave them. 'I AM in prison' he replied. 'My country keeps me here.'

I was expecting more of the same - the violins, the yellow stars, the broken glass, the marching boots, the lines and trains and chimneys. All these images somehow associated in my mind with bulldozers and the stories told to me by the veteren soldiers I knew. In telling Charlotte's story, in their way, Horse + Bamboo have healed the holocaust for me. They have taken it back. To Germany and France and the 1930s and 40s. Through the eyes of one real woman - not a flickering image on an old newsreel, but a flesh and blood woman with a past, a family, a complex life and loves and dreams and aspirations.

But it only came up near the end. Charlotte lived and developed her genius and art before any holocaust. First we have the story of Charlotte's childhood. Her mother's madness is so clevely shown - her divided heart becoming first two then three people - one wanting to stay with Charlotte, one seeking solace - and one drawn inevitably, like a moth to a candle flame, to the beckoning window and the fatal leap.

Like her mother and her grandmother, Charlotte herself is eventually drawn into the spell of suicide and awareness of the unbearableness and futility of life. Her father reveals the family secret - that the women are all bear this curse. But Charlotte is saved. By angels. And in the company of the angel she is healed. She has found the key - her madness is not a curse but the blessing of vision. Her vision of the angel has lifted her from her identification with the empty succession of events that she thought her life was. Eventually it inspires her art - 'Leben? Oder Theater?' (Life? Or Theatre?) She paints music - she paints the idea of painting music. She paints and labels hundreds of concepts and images, the building blocks of this theatre, simple and complex.

The theatrical devices are endlessly ingenious - from the moving furniture at the outset to the changing images of the train journey through Europe. Evocative and delightful, harrowing or utterly mystical - the range is immense and we are played through it like a musical instrument. The score of the play is also superbly sensitive and I understand each piece of music was significant to Charlotte's work and the times she lived in.

We go through these dramas - terrible trials and also very happy moments becoming completely engaged with this girl becoming a woman and her family. Then it comes - the trap closing in, the fear, rejection and uncertainty of those who discover that those among whom they have lived their lives are turning against them through an outside process which they cannot understand or control. Seeing it through their eyes - through Charlotte's eyes, was like seeing it for the first time. And I cried, for her, her fear and that of all those whose terror and pain we have witnessed throughout the world who have been doomed to suddenly find themselves outsiders, vermin in their own streets and towns. It's not, to me, six million of one kind and 500,000 of another and 1 million of another - it's one person, one heart, one life, one person learning to make sense of their existence, one growing fear, one person reckoning the odds, for themselves, their children, their old folk, not wanting to believe, one person fleeing or being unable to flee, one person being crushed, beaten, tortured and dying in the hands of enemies, and then another, and another and another......

The company is utterly professional - what they do, they do 100%. In this case, whether intended or not, for me they have reclaimed this period of history, cleansed it from the taint of its exploiters and let us take this woman's fascinating and mystical story to our hearts. My companion, an artist, was taken on another ride by this performance, which he also was fascinated by. I wonder what a Rwandan would have made of it?