An extraordinarily in-depth account of wartime atrocity, compromise and heroism from two creatives in exile
The Łódź Ghetto, established by the Nazis in Poland, was always on the infamous list of places where Jews were confined before eventual deportation (for most) to the death camps. This partly fictionalised account of its inception is all too plausible. That the Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky and director Maxim Didenko are both Jewish Russian dissidents in political exile and vehement critics of the war against Ukraine and “resentful neoimperialist regime” (as Glukhovsky said of Putin’s reign) gives it contemporary resonance.
The White Factory, a gripping, often heartbreaking, drama, examines with vivid and graphic theatricality a descent into unwitting collusion with the Nazis that began with desperate good intentions and spiralled inexorably into providing them with a testing ground for building the machinery of the Holocaust.
A sinister opening scene on the stunning, appropriately white-box set (Gayla Solodovnikova), incorporating video and back projection and a soundscape generated by the cast with rhythmic physicality, sets up the unease of pre-war Poland (dates are projected above the stage). That the cast is dressed in white sheet-like capes adds to the unsettling strangeness. The set-up proceeds swiftly as uniformed Nazi official Wilhelm Koppe (chilling James Garnon) forces a devastating compromise on Chaim Rumkowski, the Jewish elder, head of a local orphanage, he has coerced into leading the community to submit to ever more draconian orders.
Adrian Schiller’s Rumkowski graphically shows the agonising decline into desperate compromise. His apparently feasible plan to save Jewish lives by establishing the Ghetto as a manufacturing hub, providing a range of vital supplies for the German Reich and its troops, might indeed prove that the grim words above the gates of Auschwitz – ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (Work makes you free) – might contain a grain of truth.
With hindsight, we know compromise and collaboration with the Nazis provided a cruel twist that gave them ideas and means to establish Hitler’s Final Solution. This is distinctly evident from the cynical exploitation of Rumkowski into a man prepared to gamble with the lives of children, to offer thousands of under-10s to fulfil the ever-increasing numbers of Jews demanded to fulfil quotas for the camps.
Rumkowski’s descent into bargaining, even exploiting his fellow Jews, is especially distressing for the audience. That the actor also switches effortlessly to portray sickly Jewish elder Ezekiel, who can hardly stand, underlines the message that old age might also be a marker for fulfilling a quota.
It is both contrasted with and intensified by the plight of the young Jewish family, Yosef Kaufman, Rumkowski’s lawyer, his wife Rivke and young sons Hermann and Volf (aged eight and 10). Mark Quartley’s Kaufman starts bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, convinced there is no real threat to Poland from the Nazis, so that his fall into despair is all the more telling. Rivke’s horrified resistance (empathetically displayed by Pearl Chanda) is especially heartrending as we watch her boys at play with a model train set and teddy bear, knowing their fate is in the balance.
I would not want to spoil a stirring coup de théatre, but if I reveal that the titular White Factory produces pillows stuffed with feathers of hens once owned by Jews, you may guess the impact of emptying the white cloth sacks on stage. It is in fact far more devastating, leaving us with an indelible image that typifies this extraordinary and uncompromising drama.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Mark Senior
The White Factory runs until Saturday 4 November. 7.15pm, 2pm (Wed & Sat only). From £21.50. Marylebone Theatre, London, NW1 6XT. marylebonetheatre.com