A new play opening this week asks hard questions about the power of the past. John Nathan met its writer The legacy of trauma
CENTRAL TO Cordelia Lynn’s new play Love And Other Acts of Violence, which reopens the revamped Donmar Warehouse this week, is the notion that the trauma of atrocity can be passed down the generations like an unwanted though compulsory heirloom.
This, Lynn’s play argues, is as true for the perpetrators as it is for the victims, if the victim survives to have children, that is.
Take the nameless couple at the centre of Lynn’s play. He is a left wing activist (Tom Mothersdale) while she is a Jewish scientist (Abigail Weinstock in her professional debut). When they first encounter each other they are students living in a country that looks roughly like the UK today. By the time the relationship is ten years old the country is unmistakeably fascist. Jews and other minorities are under attack, not only by racists but by government policy. And it is the pressure of this politics that reveals His and Her hitherto dormant and shared inheritances.
“Trauma is not something, I think, that is only carried by victims,” explains Lynn during a break in rehearsals. “This is a tricky and problematic thing to say but I believe perpetrators carry their own troubled form of trauma too. Love and Other Acts of Violence looks at the relationship between the descendant of a perpetrator [Him in the play] and the descendent of a victim [Her],” continues Lynn.
We are talking on Zoom for which Lynn has been given a room that looks like a prison cell with a piano. “In theory it’s called the music room,” she says. “I’ve never seen music being played here,” she adds, her discernable scepticism perhaps rooted in her previous life as a piano student at the Yehudi Menuhin School. It is a past with which she still has a connection by writing libretti for operas when not forging plays whose characters live with the aftermath of political violence such as One For Sorrow and Lela & Co, both at the Royal Court.
This though may be her trickiest and most problematic play, to use her phrase. Some may see the idea of inherited trauma as part of trend that pathologises bad choices and absolves the people who make them of responsibility. Others might balk at an idea that not only suggests trauma can be hereditary but that guilt can be too, a notion that has been resisted by many a Holocaust survivor refusing to blame later generations of Germans for what their antecedents did.
It is worth adding here that the real-life atrocity underpinning Lynn’s fictional play is not related to the Holocaust. Nor is she recalling the shtetl of her own forebears.
“I’m not interested in autobiography,” she says plainly, referring to the lineage of her father Jonathan, a
It has been a powerful part of the process to have someone Polish in the rehearsal room. We need all these voices to make the play work
former international journalist and now head of communications at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — not to be confused with the Yes Minister writer.
Lynn’s mother is Irish Catholic which along with her Jewish half Lynn likes to think amounts to a “lethal combination.”
No, the particular moment of antisemitic violence in Lynn’s play happened in 1918 after the fall of the Astro-Hungarian Empire in the (now) Ukrainian town called Lviv, which the Germans knew as Lemberg and the Poles called Lwow. The Jews who lived there were citizens of all three powers during the period in which the borders violently changed hands until the Poles overwhelmed the Ukrainians and slaughtered the Jews, falsely accusing them of being collaborators (although some might say that traditionally no such pretext is required).
We learn that the families of both her main characters can be traced back to this town, though as Her quickly acknowledges they were unlikely to have been friendly.
I wonder if Lynn worries if modern-day Polish people might feel unfairly implicated by the idea of inherited guilt. The production, which is directed by Elayce Ismail, has a Polish designer Basia Binkowska who, Lynn says finds
This is a tricky and problematic thing to say but I believe perpetrators carry their own troubled form of trauma too
the play hard to watch. But it has “been a really powerful part of the process having her in the rehearsal room, talking to me and the director and the actors [about] historical perspectives and Poland. We need all these voices to make this play work.”
Lynn’s wider point however is that neither of her characters leads faultless lives. “Both are flawed, dangerous and frustrating,” she says. “Her no less so than Him.”
“I’m not a historian,” Lynn is quick to say. “But for me the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and how the whole landscape of Europe fundamentally changed leading to the fascism and totalitarianism that we saw with the Nazis and Stalin — I guess I feel a sort of similar moment now.”
The now to which Lynn refers began in 2016 with the Brexit vote, when Lynn was 25 (she’s now 32) and then continued with Trump. But have not the most recent events shown that antisemitism is more likely to come from the left than it is the right?
“This is the government I am frightened of,” she says. “Significantly more so than the left-wing opposition. I would hope that audience members would hold in mind our government’s rhetoric, their bills on policing, immigration, judicial review and elections, and the proposals for the Official
Secrets Act while watching this play.” But no, the play isn’t a prediction. And she’s not even comfortable calling it a warning.
“When I’m writing I don’t sit down and think ‘Now I’m going to write a play that will warn the public about a calamitous future.’ I’m not sure I think at all in fact. Works of art are a kind of offering. People will interpret and take from them what they will, and refuse and reject what they will too.”
However, none of this, says Lynn is to deny that antisemitism is not a left wing problem too.
“I don’t think any part of the political spectrum is immune to antisemitism. In fact, I think when any group, or person, begins to consider itself morally unimpeachable then you’ve got a problem. And while this play observes the journey [to atrocity] through a right-wing nationalist and populist government, I suspect both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences may notice that when the violence and distrust occurs between the two characters, it occurs between a Jewish woman, and a left-wing activist.”
On the page at least, the violence is graphic. The role of Her particularly is a lot to take on, especially for an actor making her a professional debut such as Weinstock. “It’s a huge job,” admits Lynn.
With the “Jew-face” controversy heating up over the TV series Ridley Road and Sarah Silverman’s comments in America, was it important the role of Her should be played by a Jew?
“We did feel that this story needed to be told through a Jewish actor,” says Lynn.
I ask whether she feels that she herself carries inherited trauma. Her answer at first feels more academic than personal. “Historical violence” is a “necessary assumption” for Jews and “weighs heavily” she says.
But then more revealingly she adds that there are stories that have been handed down from her Bialystock forebears. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a dramatist, she prefers to dwell on those stories rather than the actual history.
One is about an Uncle Ben. It is said that he escaped from the Nazis on a canoe at Rostock with only the precious family painting by Bruno Gimpel to use as a paddle. But, she adds, Uncle Ben clearly didn’t escape that way.
“But each time this story got told, it was, deliberately, adapted in the telling to the point of heroic absurdity, until here we are today with Uncle Ben and his canoe. And I suspect, though I might be wrong, that some people reading this might be smiling a knowing smile because there might be similar stories told to the point of absurdity in their families. Because this is about survival. And humour in the dark is not only, in my opinion, a legitimate means of survival, but an absolutely necessary means of survival. And while I hesitate to use broad brushstrokes, I do think that Jewish artists in the past century have demonstrated a particular excellence with a form of dark and ironical humour. And that is very meaningful to me.”
We did feel that this story needed to be told through a Jewish actor
This is the government I am frightened of now, significantly more than the left-wing opposition
Love and Other Acts of Violence is at the Donmar Warehouse until November 27 www.donmarwarehouse.com