 |
| Stuart Williams and Michael Countryman Photo by Lia Chang |
A small plaque
at the entrance to the Bethnal Green underground station in London commemorates
the event: “Site of the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War.”
In the grand
scheme of things, it was just another unfortunate incident of World War II –
this loss of 173 lives – a bit of “collateral damage” easily forgotten in the
wake of the many millions of civilian losses overall, or even among the 40,000 non-combatant
deaths that occurred during the infamous “Blitz,” the German air attacks that
blanketed Britain.
What makes
this event noteworthy beyond the interests of the families and friends of the
victims is how it came to pass, during what was a common enough occurrence as the
neighborhood’s residents were prompted by air-raid sirens to seek shelter. Tragically,
without a single plane on the scene, without a bomb being dropped or a weapon
fired, more than half of the shelter-seekers fell, were pushed, or tumbled over
one another and were crushed to death after a woman carrying an infant lost her
footing on the unlit staircase, starting an unstoppable pileup.
Many years
later, in 2010, writer Jessica Francis Kane made
the incident the basis for a novel, The Report. In it, the author used the mode
of fiction to explore the aftermath, including how the official inquiry was
steeped in wartime secrecy that left the community puzzled, angry, and bitter.
Now playwright
Martin Casella has translated that novel into a play, also called The Report,
being given a first-class production as part of FringeNYC.
Michael Countryman,
an American actor with the chops to pull off a credible upper class British
accent and demeanor, plays Sir Laurence Dunne, the man charged with
investigating the incident and writing the official report. As the play opens,
it is 30 years later. Sir Laurence has a
visitor, Paul (Stuart Williams), a documentary filmmaker who wants to uncover the
truth about what really happened that night. The play flows back and forth in
time as the uniformly excellent cast of 12 enacts the event and provides the
sometimes contradictory, sometimes self-serving testimony.
Be aware that things
move slowly at first, paced like one of those genteel BBC dramas on Masterpiece
Theatre that we find ourselves enraptured by despite ourselves. During the first act, the playwright
takes great pains to keep things at an emotional remove, so that our attention is focused
on the gathering of details. What was the mood of the crowd that night? Did the distrust of “foreigners” (meaning
Jewish refugees who had recently moved into the area) feed into a frenzy of panic? Were the people spooked by the sounds of some
new secret anti-aircraft weaponry that was being tested? Was the entrance to the underground station
so poorly designed and poorly lit as to invite disaster? And, most significantly, did the woman with
the baby really stumble, or was she shoved?
The tone of
the work shifts gradually so that during the second act, as the bits and pieces
of information become the stories of real people, the play turns out to be
not so much about the victims as it is about the psychological impact on the survivors.
Some are devastated by their losses, while others are torn apart by a sense of
guilt or responsibility, or they feel compelled to cover up errors in judgment or
irresponsible behaviors that they relive over and over again.
Director Alan
Muraoka does a splendid job keeping things well-paced and accessible for
the audience, despite the numerous characters who are being portrayed, the
back-and-forth movement of time, and the layers of information we need to sift through.
Among
the cast, Mr. Countryman and Mr. Williams are standouts, as is Zoë Watkins as Ada, who is most affected by the
disaster and of her role in it. For the survivors, it is not enough that this was a
terrible accident for which no explanation can suffice. Their lives are undone,
and that, more than anything, is the truth of the story of Bethnal Green.
Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment