Pascal’s portrait of collaboration is
worlds away from that of William Douglas-Home’s The Dame of Sark, in
which the eponymous heroine, the personification of the great British virtues of
decency and pluck (the part was originated by Anna Neagle), outwits the local
Nazi commander. Small wonder that Pascal’s play has been banned on Guernsey.
But islanders who have seen it have been much affected, including the Bailiff’s
grandson, who told the playwright that "when the war ended, the British
authorities didn’t know whether to hang my grandfather or to knight him."
In the event, the Queen Mother knighted hi in 1945.
Although a degree of accuracy has been
subtracted by turning Theresa from a young music student into a middle aged
professor, considerable authenticity has been added; the purpose of the change
is to accommodate actress Ruth Posner, who, as a child, escaped first from the
Warsaw ghetto, and later from Auschwitz when the train taking her there was
bombed by the Allies. Pascal explains that she "didn’t want to cast just
another actress. It has added so much to use someone who lived there, who can
transmit the experience just by her presence."
The second play, A Dead Woman on
Holiday, is an extension of the first. Having examined people directly
affected by genocide, Pascal wanted to explore "the next generation: people
who weren’t in the firing line." Focusing on a French-Jewish interpreter
at the Nuremberg trials, she considers the nature of love in a world that has
lost it’s innocence. "If you’ve known the Holocaust, you can’t accept
the world as it’s given to you. I wanted to look at that process from a woman’s
point of view: a woman who is free, who works, who travels. To a certain extent,
that’s me."
The trilogy is completed by Pascal’s
radical revision of Solomon Ansky’s The Dybbuk, a Yiddish classic
steeped in folklore, ghosts and mysticism. This, too, came out of the experience
of Theresa and, in particular, of performing on a German tour where she
was conscious that, for a Jew, "there were nothing but ghosts.. Hitler had
won. So I used the Ansky play as a way into my personal Dybbuks. At the
same time, I was very aware of into a culture that was mine. There is very
little Jewish theatre tradition, no mystery plays, only The Dybbuk and Golem.
Pascal is one of a tiny band of
playwrights - others being CP Taylor and Bernard Kops - who have dared to
present the Nazis on the British stage. She points to the particular power of
the medium: "No one can absorb the death of six million people. And you can
never show people starving in concentration camps. But, on stage, you can make
them mirror the audience; they are ordinary people ripped out of their lives.
And, because theatre takes place in the present, it isn’t relegated to
history.
Although
she born after the war, for
Pascal, as for many Jews, the Holocaust has been the defining event of her life.
"It governs the way I think and act. I’m determined to make my life mean
something. I feel very strongly that they got six million of us, but here’s
one who survived. I’m a Jewish atheist and there aren’t many role models,
apart from Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg."
Her choice led to a breach with her
family so great that she has not spoken to her mother for 25 years. "I’ve
never wanted children... They can burn your children; but they can’t burn your
books. Well, they can; but not if you keep copies of your scripts dotted around
in enough places."
She herself has been the victim of
anti-Semitism in both Britain and France, where she lives for most of the time
with her husband, until recently the Socialist mayor of Maubeuge. There, because
of her dark hair and colouring, she is often taken for an Arab and subjected to
that currently more respectable brand of racism. She, however, sees it as
another manifestation of the same sickness, insisting that "people are born
innocent and the hierarchies are there to make them clock into evil. Evil is to
do with the way that we have constructed our society into castes, into sects,
into slaves."
Pascal’s three Holocaust plays have
been performed extensively throughout Europe to audiences of many different
colours and creeds (at London’s Oval House, a predominantly black audience
related Theresa’s plight to its own immigrant experience). Although in her
most recent work she has moved away from Jewish subjects, Pascal has kept her
crusading zeal. "My home is with people on the fringes; that’s what makes
me write. I’m not interested in those who have their fingernails on the edge
of it and are about to drop off."
