At the heart of Alexander Bodin Saphir’s fascinating first play lies a historical fact: in 1943, 7,500 Danish Jews escaped by boat from their Nazi-occupied native country to Sweden. To this day there are debates about how this mass exodus was possible. Saphir’s play intelligently explores the subject.
The argument is largely conducted, in 2001, by two men who were eight years old at the time of the rescue. Abraham is an observant Jew who believes it was the result of divine intervention and heroic resistance; Lars is an atheist historian seeking to prove that the mission could not have succeeded without German complicity. This leads to a fierce and riveting conflict between these onetime friends, confined in Abraham’s home by a snowstorm.
In his zeal to prove that our private lives are as full of mysteries as public events, Saphir introduces a number of side issues: a long-ago affair between Lars and Abraham’s wife, and revelations about the sex life of Lars’s daughter. Like WS Gilbert’s flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, they have nothing to do with the case.
The play makes gripping viewing in Kate Fahy’s probing production and is vigorously acted. David Bamber’s Abraham has the right gravity and Neil McCaul’s Lars exudes the arrogance of the self-righteous historian. The real sanity, however, seems to lie with Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Lars’s novelist daughter and Julia Swift as Abraham’s calming wife. While the play is an examination of history, it also raises a disturbing question: would today’s Danish government, with its anti-immigrant rhetoric, show the same compassion to its minority Muslims as was accorded in 1943 to its beleaguered Jews?
At the Park theatre, London, until 9 February.
