Musical mockery

Forbidden Broadway
Menier Chocolate Factory

Dr Korczak’s Example
Arcola

David Greig’s holocaust play starts with a reminder that any Jew found outside the Warsaw ghetto would be shot. My feeling is that any playwright found inside the Warsaw ghetto should get the same treatment. The situation is so loaded with suffering, irony, despair and every other kind of dramatic Semtex that it requires exceptionally skilful fingers to make it work. Greig focuses on the ghetto orphanage and a love–hate relationship between two damaged kids who shout VERY LOUDLY at each other a lot. It’s the Holocaust for the Hollyoaks generation, the final solution with a spoonful of sugar. Amy Leach’s spirited production hangs neatly together and brings out the script’s limited range of effects extremely well.

The founder of the orphanage is a liberal paediatrician, Dr Korczak, who champions civilised values in the somewhat unlikely hope that the Nazis will follow suit. Korczak’s work formed the basis of the international convention on children’s rights and the play ends with a recital of the privileges he wanted to guarantee. These include ‘the right to love, the right to fail, the right to education and the right to resist education’. Fascinating. Where but in the Warsaw ghetto would anyone dream of loading childhood with limitless freedoms and entitlements? This explains why the concept of ‘universal rights’ is so impractical and wrong-headed and leads inevitably to resentment, injustice and false expectation. It’s the shopping list of the damned, the consoling fantasy of a slave population on death row.