The road to Auschwitz

Theatre: Lotte’s Journey, Cloud Nine, Joe Guy

Beware of plays that open on trains trundling through Europe in the 1940s. You know where they’re heading. The strength of Candida Cave’s new work, Lotte’s Journey, is that it evades cliché by telling the passengers’ stories in reverse. In particular we focus on Charlotte Saloman, a brilliant Jewish artist haunted by the suicide of her mother and grandmother. The script is technically ambitious and takes us from Berlin to Rome and Nice, and covers Saloman’s life from the age of eight when her father explained the cause of her mother’s death as influenza. These large transitions are skilfully handled by Ninon Jerome’s direction. Lotte Collett’s design is compact and admirably suggestive. In the space of a few years Saloman produced a highly innovative and expressive collection of paintings which remain unjustly neglected. Murdered at Auschwitz aged 26, she would have been 90 this year. The final irony is that she might have survived had her parents let her pursue a love affair that would have taken her beyond danger. Their desire to protect her killed her.

Down the road at the Almeida there’s a revival of an unutterably silly experimental play by Caryl Churchill. Cloud Nine opens in some faraway outpost of the Empire where a family of effete Victorians are doing their best for Queen and country. Half the cast are in drag and everyone camps it up like mad. There are lots of bad wisecracks, scandalous affairs and covert embraces and this cartoonish approach makes it feel like an episode of Jewel in the Crown written by Benny Hill. As in all of Churchill’s work what stands out isn’t the story or the characters but the author’s implacable judgmentalism.