Tikkun Olam Theatre review: Who gets to remember the Shoah?

Tikkun Olam
Original Theatre online | ★★★★✩

In choosing as his subject the fight to build or prevent a Holocaust memorial next to Parliament, Dutch stage director Teunkie van der Sluijs treads on territory few writers would have the confidence to explore in his debut play.

The production itself, directed by former RSC artistic director Michael Boyd, is also an outlier in the sense that it exists only online. As part of this theatre company’s project to champion new writers it is one of three new plays to be filmed on stage with semi-rehearsed casts who perform (very well) with script in hand.

Tikkun Olam - Debbie Korley - (c) Tom Grace Portrait

Debbie Korley

Steve Alexander (Jake Fairbrother) is a Labour MP who is campaigning in favour of the Shoah memorial. His adviser Dan (Luke Thompson) conscripts Jewish influencer Leah (Debbie Korley) to anonymously weigh in with arguments in favour of the memorial, mainly to counter local opposition to the plan.

The grassroots movement against is embodied by retired nurse and local resident Mary (Diana Quick) whose objections sound like nimbyism but are tinged with petty nationalism. Is it up to Britons to memorialise the Holocaust when it wasn’t even their country that committed the crime?

For Steve — the son of an English mother and West Indian father — his rather hoary big picture arguments recognise that it was the human race who perpetrated the atrocity, and so as humans is it not all our responsibility to remember and learn from the atrocity?

No one questions whether by making the entire race responsible for the worst crimes in history effectively absolves those who carried them out. But van der Sluijs’s play gets into its stride in excavating the political motivations behind the pro-memorial camp’s position.

Steve’s campaign is counter-intuitive when you consider he is courting opposition in a constituency he will try to win at the next election.

But his is a position of principle, he assures Leah. Yes, there are more Jews in his constituency than most others, but still too few to swing the vote in his favour. Leah, however, is quick to point out that given his party’s recent relationship to Jews it would be strongly symbolic to get their support.

Tikkun Olam - Luke Thompson - (c) Tom Grace Portrait

Luke Thompson