Social media makes us brave stand-takers and moralisers. We cluster in like-minded tribes to have our righteousness reinforced and we are rarely bailed up by moral dilemmas that threaten our complacency, let alone our lives. Do any of our Facebook friends, for example, have to consider a US-Mexico border security job as their only option for feeding their families? Blonde Poison may speak of a bygone era but we in the so-called ‘first world’ remain susceptible to the same forces – and the treatment of the Rohingya people in Myanmar is but one contemporary example of humanity’s endless capacity for inhumanity.

John Parker’s stage setting, brightly lit by Nik Januirek, reeks of the Third Reich: a huge blood red curtain as a backdrop with a large gold-framed mirror at its centre; two black leather chairs; a square black coffee table bearing a delicate china tea setting for two. Company is expected.  

When Elizabeth Hawthorne’s Stella Goldschlag arrives home from the bakery, she has a letter. Its contents absorb her – and us, such is the power of her performance even now. But we are not made privy to it – she’s expecting a journalist: Paul Waterman who used to profess his love for her when they were children in a choir. Now he wants to interview her, aged 71, about her experiences during the war. (I’m guessing Louw play is set around the turn of the millennium.)

Everything must be nice, clean and in order. Her immaculate linen suit (Elizabeth Whiting), neatly cropped hair – still showing the titular blonde – and her careful placing of all the elements suggests a very polite and proper meeting is in store. Except something in the letter compels her to repeat, “I tried… I tried… What could I do?” She seems to be talking to her Mutti … Before we answer to God or the State we must answer to our mothers. Is Mutti still proud of her girl?

The outpouring of her story seems driven by the imminent arrival of Waterman. The programme and publicity tell us she is Jewish, but she could easily pass as ‘Aryan’ – except we soon discover she was betrayed as Jewish by another young woman ‘catcher’ and, to stop her parents being sent to the ‘camps’, she became a ‘catcher’ too. What is shocking is that even now she spits venom at the Jews with their big black hats and ‘disrespectful’ habit of speaking their own language in public (just one of the touches that remind us how close we may be to repeating history).

Young, vain and full of the life she would so mindlessly deny others, she was a nude model, but heeded her mother’s advice to “keep their tongues hanging out”. She was loved by many men – such love stories she shares! – and she had a daughter by one.

Who might she have been had the war not intervened? A jazz singer, probably. In this context her light and lively snippets of ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goodbye)’ and ‘Me and My Shadow’ gain ominous overtones.

She was a star to the Gestapo, of course; a star of their ‘Greifer service’. Who better than a beautiful blonde woman who happened to be Jewish to locate the ‘u-boats’, as the uncaptured Jews were known? And it won her the right not to wear a yellow star. In fact she was awarded the Iron Cross.

Elizabeth Hawthorne is riveting as she juggles Stella’s ‘might-have-beens’ with what actually happened and demands we put ourselves in her shoes: what would we have done? Familial love is central. Yes we all must love one another but when it comes to family, when either/or choices have to be made, nothing transcends our desire to protect our families and to be loved and respected by them in return. As for when she is done by as she has done …

The audience is rapt: our silent attention shrouds her performance as we wrestle inwardly with the moral dilemma, judging ourselves as well as her. Despite our stillness and silence this is highly interactive theatre. Director Paul Gittens has worked with Hawthorne to exquisitely calibrate and modulate a totally compelling ninety minutes.  

Remember the letter? Its contents and who it is from are revealed to generate the very powerful ending that must not be betrayed here. Suffice to say it is intensely ‘on theme’: as distilled a ‘what would I do?’ moment as you could hope for.

On opening night a technical malfunction meant a crucial blackout and sound effect did not occur. Instead Hawthorn held a frozen moment under full light until the director signified ‘The End’ by applauding – in which we participated whole-heartedly. Huge congratulations are due to Hawthorn for holding the moment and making it work. Such is our trust in their work that we almost bought it – but I’m glad to know this was not the intended ending.

It’s only on this week. Not to be missed! 

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In an era when the slightest misdemeanour can trigger a tsunami of digital outrage, it is bracing to find a play that scrutinises the perilous horns of a very real moral dilemma and gently suggests self-examination might be more fruitful than condemnation.

Blonde Poison tells the story of an assimilated German Jew, Stella Goldschlag, whose fierce will to survive leads her into whole-hearted co-operation with the Nazi’s brutally efficient roundup of Jews in hiding from transportation to the death camps.

Elizabeth Hawthorne’s performance hauntingly brings to life the unimaginable horror of living under a totalitarian regime bent on mass-murder. [More] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Elizabeth Hawthorne lends a sense of a visitation to her portrayal of the Blonde Ghost. There are moments in the play in which Hawthorne and Goldschlag become one. Or rather the play’s forces, in a synergetic magic of the stage, may have you experiencing an unnerving sense, just as when you are asleep and dreaming, that Stella herself is powering through the layers of performance and delivery, in a battle with Elizabeth to speak her own words directly to the crowd.

After the show on opening night there was a polite and celebratory buzz in the foyer, as the audience and the sponsors, largely wearing high end formal attire, exchanged observations, chat and enjoyed some cheese and wine.  There was a short speech from David Aston (one of the producers along with Director Paul Gittins) and the comment that, after seeing the play, one felt “alive and human”. Remember that word, because I’ll come back to it.  Then there was a short speech from Hawthorne. The speeches were not a lot more than a formal exchange of gratitude for the work and the opportunity to produce the work. 

I mention this carefully intoned aftermath because it mirrors the longer-than-usual pause between the end of the play and the audience’s sharply responsive standing ovation.  An aftershock. A shared unity in punctuation.

What Blonde Poison brings us, that creates this resonant absence of commentary, is a journey into the third Reich from a human vantage (again, that word human) that has been very rare over the generational fallout of the last seventy-five years, at least until relatively recently. 

The playwright Gail Louw (from Johannesburg) has created a work that resolutely upholds a verbal musicality that is not insubstantial compared to the themes it portrays.  The language is at times like a musical score, and I’m obliged to reference that because of the nods to Germany’s great composers which lead us there, but there is an extraordinary layered poetry in the script of story, memory and visceral, impacting language that brings an experiential reminiscing to the fore for those in the seats. 

Hawthorne’s agility with the deeply textured script brings storylines together with precise psychological variation within the character of Goldschlag, and into a transporting narrative. This happens both in the present, as Stella waits for the arrival of a “yournalist”, and historically, as she pre-empts the answers to his guessed questions. It is written very successfully, for the historical life of Goldschlag relentlessly impacts on the immediate narrative like a symphonic encroaching war.

Goldschlag looks impeccable, on a simple stage that references fastidiousness.  And if you have any doubt as to whether the play ought to be recontextualised in contemporary environs in your analysis as audience, you are actually mirrored in the set design.  A constant urge to reflect on yourself.  Within the themes of the play, this reflection is the central nervous system of Blonde Poison.  It is worth remembering that it was the steady erosion of the Weimar Republic that gave seed to critical thinking in the philosophies, literature, theatre and theory which grew from those oppressive controls.

“I am a victim of Fascism” is the resounding plea of Goldschlag’s voice on the stand, reverting to girlishness and then repeating in a demanding tone. Goldschlag, it seems, was also at home with the different uses of the voice, as with the body, and her appearance while she was a Greifer (catcher). As we watch the show we can imagine an extraordinary performative kraft of concealment along with the arduous womanly and monstrous responsibilities of surviving the fascist regime. At the crux of the 80 minute play, with her arms outstretched centre-stage, this figure is memorably a symbol of the destroyed feminine in war-torn ages, but she is also persuasively and irreconcilably the destroyer. And this brings us to the issues of redemption and themes of genocide that have traditionally never been so approachable.  

We also get to understand, importantly, the case for a gradual revelation of genocide over the course of those few devastating years.  To what extent was it truly possible to deny what was happening?  The overwhelming sense of incremental dread, pervading everyday life, is paramount to Goldschlag’s moral defence.

The character of the real life Stella Goldschlag is probably referred to as evil more than the times I’ve seen it in my recent research. Using this word evil, in the context of genocide, the Reich and the fascist movement as a force, facilitates the notion of an individual being overtaken by an esoteric or spiritual force.  Depending on one’s religious beliefs, and moral code, evil, can to greater or lesser degrees take the weight of one’s human choices.  If you have ever wondered where the membrane lies between the individual and the structured society in a fascist emergence, then you probably ought to see this show. 

Plumb Productions sets a strong precedent for itself with this uncompromised and strong clarion. A younger audience (the producer’s age limit is 13 years and older) could possibly benefit from some guidance and historical context.

The marvel of this work is that it takes us on a human journey into a fascist movement, and looks closely at how something human becomes inhumane. 

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