MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling, 25 May 2007,and touring

Magdalena Kaleta and Fraser C. Sivewright as Anna and David.

THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the Second World War was a moment ripe with potential and laden with the weight of the past. It was a time when people could begin to put behind them the tragedy and horror of war and look forward to a new life, whether that be a socialist utopia or a consumerist dream.

It is this moment of transition, this still point of the turning world, that Henry Adam identifies in ‘e Polish Quine. His rural Aberdeenshire characters know the past is behind them and that some great shift is ahead but, for the time being, they are unresolved.

Of course, even with an event as significant as the Second World War, there is no such thing as a clean break. The war changed people dramatically, but it didn’t change everyone in the same way. Some were radicalised, while others held on to the values and prejudices that served them well before the moral and social fabric was so roundly challenged by fascism.

Thus in Adam’s play, we find a soldier, David (Fraser C Sivewright), returning to the land of his childhood, unable to reconcile the horror of the Auschwitz concentration camp with day-to-day peacetime life.

Scared to move forward, he finds his experiences and his university education make it equally impossible to retreat into his past. In Anna (Magdalena Kaleta), the Polish refugee of the title, he thinks he has found a kindred spirit until, at the play’s climax, she reveals that her own experience of exile, rape and abuse has not diminished her anti-Semitism.

Produced in an eccentrically-lit staging by Matthew Zajac for Dogstar in which the outdoor scenes are dimmer than the indoor, the play has its greatest strengths in the language, a rich, sonorous Doric, and in the vivid sense of the landscape.

For the most part, that’s enough to keep you interested, but not enough to compensate for the time it takes for Adam to reach the dramatic heart of his play. Even as late as the interval, the play’s deeper thematic meaning is not apparent and, when finally David plays his cards, describing his most horrific experience in Auschwitz, it feels like the real drama has happened somewhere else.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• Dogstar Theatre