Four friends and a Nazi called Grandma
Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia
ANYONE WHO is expecting that Josh Azouz is going to tackle the daunting subject of his new play with sober realism had better think again. The opening scene features a Jew, Victor, buried up to his neck in Tunisia’s arid landscape. Standing over him is an Arab, Youssef who is under German orders to urinate on his best friend.
Azouz, whose debut play was the delicately written The Mikvah Project (2015) is more interested in the absurdity of evil rather than its banality. Whether someone who is dying of thirst and is in fear for their life can ever be one half of a witty conversation is besides Azouz’s point, we’re encouraged to conclude. So too is the 21st century irony through which his characters view each other and their circumstances.
Granted, the banter can seem incongruous in the context of crimes against humanity. But any complaints that it is in bad taste — and there have been one or two — rather miss the point that there is substance beneath the jocular veneer.
So even though the Nazi officer here is played by Adrian Edmondson who is still remembered as the manic loose cannon of such BBC comedies as Bottom and The Young Ones, I’d argue that Gordon Kaye’s René in Allo Allo was far more trivialising of the German occupation than Edmondson’s Nazi, even if he does go by the nickname of Grandma.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. After that first scene the action lurches back in time to explore the long term friendship between Jewish couple Victor (Pierro Niel-Mee) and Loys (Yasmin Paige), and Muslim couple Youssef (Ethan Kai) and Faiza (Laura Hanna). They all share a culture and childhood memories. Passover and Eid were celebrated in each other’s company, we learn.
It is a friendship that withstands occasional flare ups between the communities — that time when a Jewish toddler was thrown onto a cactus, for instance. But the Nazi occupation drives a wedge. The Germans have promised self determination for the majority of Tunisia’s Arabs unlike the much-hated previous occupiers, the French. And now Victor sees a future in Palestine.
Azouz’s achievement is to show such geopolitical ructions as the result of completely understandable human nature and not colonial conspiracy. Take the musings of Grandma (a nickname given to him by his murderous men for whom he likes to knit).
“The Arabs…have yet to succumb to our charms,” he says, before listing those who have succumbed willingly which is a very long list indeed and does a lot justify Victor’s hopes.
Edmondson is on terrific form here, injecting Grandma’s jovial civility with menace — a quality that is given room to blossom in the scene where he forces Jewish Loys to have dinner with him.
His name will be useful in the event that the British win and they come looking for the “psycho” who ran the camps, he tells her. “You see yourself as a psycho?” she asks. “I’m working on self acceptance.”
Max Johns’s design is constructed from plywood boxes. They work well evoking the harsh minimalism landscape but adapt clumsily for the interior scenes.
And although Eleanor Rhode’s production nimbly treads the tricky line of serious comedy there are scenes that are uncertain as to whether they should succumb to farce or straight drama. Perhaps that uncertainty lies in the script.
But in terms of content this is a brave work that filters the Holocaust, the notion of Israel and Arab Jewish relations before and after the war through the prism of a defining moment of history.
And in terms of what happened next the result here reveals a complexity that is all too often lost on those who blindly love and hate Israel.
Jews and Arabs share a culture and childhood memories; Passover and Eid were celebrated together