As Long As We Are Breathing review: ‘poignant but not enough punch’

We could all learn from Miriam Freedman. Having survived the Holocaust, sometimes by hiding in an impossibly cramped basement as Nazi soldiers searched the building, Freedman found a way of exorcising the bitterness of that experience rather than carrying it with her for the rest of her life.

Her route to this healing was meditation, a practice that begins this gentle testimony play by Diane Samuels who is best known for the huge hit Kindertransport.

In Ben Caplan’s chamber production there are two Miriams. One is is our narrator, a welcoming lady in her late eighties played by Caroline Gruber. The other is a younger vivacious version of our heroine, played by Zoe Goriely who, with onstage musician Matthew James Hinchliffe, conveys the harrowing and healing events described by her older self.

Matthew James Hinchliffe[Missing Credit]

Miriam’s idyllic childhood in a Czech Orthodox Jewish family is ripped apart by anti-Jewish laws that force the family out of their Bratislava home and to the town Nitra where Miriam hides with her mother and her four sisters.

Here the apartment block’s brave caretaker, later honoured as a Righteous Gentile, we learn, excavates a space in the basement where Miriam and some of her family hide when the place is being searched by German soldiers.

The legacy of being packed into a suitcase for long periods gave Miriam a yearning to run but also the chronic back pain that in later life compelled her to try a little-known exercise regime called yoga after which she become a follower of the London-based guru Irina Tweedie.

The reassuring message of Samuels’ play, which was first seen at JW3, is that it is possible to replace trauma with inner peace. But this message is prioritised over the drama of Miriam’s story

We are told, rather than shown, how it must have felt to have been packed into a suitcase. There is little sense of claustrophobia, or of limbs being folded for so long that running becomes a compulsion.

We are told, rather than shown, how it must have felt to have been packed into a suitcase. There is little sense of claustrophobia, or of limbs being folded for so long that running becomes a compulsion. The tension generated when Miriam declares “I want to live” while in danger of being discovered is palpable, though all too fleeting.

Arcola

★★★★★