Our Class

Clearly all directors in Toronto got together when planning their seasons and decided the audience was too cheerful and needed to be reminded that evil happens in the world. Tough going for a Friday evening, but well worth seeing.
Our class is the story of a class of Polish schoolchildren who are all friends, even though some are Jews and some are Poles. The Nazis arrive and friendship is sacrificed. The eventual result is the death of 1593 of the 1600 Jews who lived in the town of Jedwabne.
Petty jealousy, fear, greed, hypocrisy, and the chance to get ahead at someone else's expense. All played a part, as did mob psychology. It seems clear that people who would never commit crimes on their own can be driven to horrible actions by the group. The pattern is not unique to Jedwabne - consider Rwanda, the Congo, Cambodia - recent history is full of this behaviour.
The play is staged very effectively, with only chairs as props. The children sing and dance to set the scene, and grow up slowly in front of you. The director makes very effective use of the chorus to carry the narrative, interspersing it with direct address to the audience as various characters tell their story. As each character dies, he/she moves a chair to the back of the stage and sits as witness to the rest of the story.
In spite of the tragic nature of the actioins, there are moments of humour - when the rabbi lists his chldren and their descendants ( a direct contrast to the earllier list of the relatives who were murdered.) Marianna's comments about her happiness in the senoris residence are also very funny.
there is a full spectrum of human behaviour portrayed - the good, the bad and the survivors who were either lucky,(Abram), pragmatic (Rachelka/Marianna) or conniving and ready to seize the main chance (Zygmunt and Heneik.
A very solid cast - many of them unknown to me, other than Jonathan Goad (I am not used to hating him, but he played the worst of the characters) and Jessica Greenberg who played Marianna. Michael Rubenfeld as Abram was very effective, but really there were no weak performances.

After Akhmatova

The play is based on historical fact and Anna Akhmatova was a real poet. Set at the time of the Bolshevik regime and the subsequent Stallinst purges, the play deals with repression and the need of the artist to create. Anna writes a poem that she cannot put in writing, so she memorises it and burns the manuscript. It is eventually published twenty years later. Is it the subversive nature of poetry that is the problem, or simply the fact that it bears witness to things the government does not want remembered?
This was a fascinating play, but hard to watch, as you waited for the police to come to arrest the two characters who speak out - Osip Mandelstam (Richard macMillan) and Anna's sone Lev Gumilyov (Eric Goulem.
Sara Orenstein gave her usual strong performance as Anna, with great support from Clare Calnan as Lydia and Caroline Gillis as Nadezhda. the one weak character was Alan Taylor, playing Paul Dunn. I think it was partly a weakness in the writing - the addition of an American was intrusive, and partly it was Taylor hismself, who seemed to find it hard to get the rythmn.