Part of the London International Festival of Theatre's superb family-friendly season, David Greig's play tells some of the story of the remarkable Polish Jew Dr Korczak who was murdered y the Nazis in 1942 and whose beliefs and work became the basis for the United Nations Convention on the rights of the Child. If that sounds a little worthy it certainly isn't in a production by James Brinning which has a Brechtian simplicity and which has live actors manipulating tiny doll like figures who represent not just the children of Dr Korczak's Warsaw ghetto orphanage but all the children wiped out in the Holocaust. The enormity of it makes you weep.
It is 1942 and in the Jewish ghetto 16 year old Adzio, who has been surviving on the streets, looks like he is just about to get a bullet in the head from the police for stealing two carrots. Dr Korczak intervenes and takes the boy back to the Jewish orphanage, a children's democracy where the children decide who can stay and who can't and have their own parliament, court and even newspaper.
Soon the attitudes and beliefs of Dr Korczak are being tested by both Adzio and the actions of the Nazi regime who are beginning to liquidate the ghetto and transport its inhabitants to the gas chambers. "I have trained them well for a perfect world," says Korczak of his charges, "how will they survive in this one?" Adzio thinks that Korczak is a fool, life on the streets has taught him that the only way to survive in such a world is to lie and cheat and shoot your way to safety.
Densely argued and beautifully written, this is a big compassionate and knotty little play that reminds that remaining human in the face of totalitarian oppression is a triumph that cannot be snatched away or rubbed out. History's little people-in this case the children-really do count. In the late summer of 1942 Dr Korczak and his 200 remaining orphans were forcibly marched to the trains that would transport them to their deaths in Treblinka. As they marched through the streets they sang the whole way. As they reached the trains they all threw off their yellow arm bands with the star of David. Witnesses later said that the fallen armbands looked like a field of buttercups.
· Until June 15. Box office: 020 7223 2223. Then at the Tron Glasgow June 19 & 20.
