Caging Skies is built out of oppositions and contrasts. It’s centred on the relationship between a young woman who is Jewish and a young man who, as a dedicated Nazi, hates Jews. The action is domestic, mostly low-key, and takes place in one modest room, while outside world war rages, bombers roam the sky blowing cities apart, and political madness convulses entire nations.

Its themes are universal and sweeping, and we see them played out in the interactions between four ordinary people. It’s set in a world full of lies, hate, cruelty and violence, and is ultimately about truth and love.  

More prosaically, the play is about what happens when a Viennese family gives refuge to Jewish Elsa during World War 2. We pick up the story later on in the war. Johannes, the only surviving son of the family and a member of the Nazi Hitler Youth organisation, has been wounded during an Allied bombing raid. Housebound by his injuries, he discovers Elsa in her hiding place.

Johannes is now in possession of the family’s and Elsa’s secret. As a committed Nazi, he is bound by his principles to turn family and Elsa over to the authorities. What will Johannes do? And why will he do it? And how will his feelings and choices fit with the lives of his mother, grandmother and Elsa?

The answers to these questions are predictable in some ways – the Circa website gives us a clue by describing the play as a “gripping journey of obsession and love” – but surprising in others. The surprises are ingenious and plausible, and constitute the play’s strongest and most interesting features.

The play is a commendably ambitious enterprise with an intriguingly international sweep, both in subject and themes, and in its origins – being Venezuelan-born Desirée Gezentsvey’s adaption of the novel by Belgian-American Christine Leunens. The challenge for award-winning writer Gezentsvey has been to give us a living sense of the lives of ordinary people and of the extraordinary times in which they live, within a narrative constructed from events spread over many months. 

Gezentsvey tackles this challenge valiantly, and often with success. Particularly in the second half of the play, there are passages where the political and the personal meet and blend believably and movingly. At other times, the dialogue labours under the weight of factual information it wants to get across to the audience. When this happens, what usually suffers is the credibility of the characters at a moment-by-moment level. 

Gezentsvey’s script gets a lot of help from a competent cast. Tim Earl works hard and for the most part successfully in the role of Johannes (onstage for most of the play). His portrayal is particularly strong and plausible in his scenes with Claire Waldron (playing Roswita) and his grandmother (Donna Akersten). He navigates the complexities and changes of his relationship with Elsa not quite so convincingly, with the script contributing its fair share to this result.

Claire Waldron offers a confident and sympathetic portrayal in her role as Johannes’s mother. She does well to bring shades and contrasts to a character who is required to spend a lot of her time on stage somewhere in an emotional range between emotionally frayed and frantically worried.

Donna Akersten brings notes of humour and warmth to the play in her role as Oma. She stands out for the relaxed mastery of her performance, and for her control of pace and timing. 

Comfrey Sanders gives us a subtle, intelligent reading of the part of Elsa. Elsa’s life, for much of the play, is one of claustrophobic confinement occasionally varied by moments of horror, grief and despair. Sanders resists the obvious temptation to play Elsa at full pitch; her interpretation of the role tends more towards the reserved and self-protective, shifting into some interesting new areas towards the end of the play. 

Credit goes to director Andrew Foster for the minimalist and effective set and light design, and to Jeremy Cullen for original music and sound, both being important components in the play’s narrative.

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