The Nazis, wrote Primo Levi, called a Jew in a concentration camp "a dead man on holiday." Julia Pascal’s new play A Dead Woman on Holiday occurs not in a concentration camp but during the Nuremberg Trials after the War. Sophie Goldenberg, a French Jew, is working as a translator during the hearings when she and an American soldier (a Catholic) meet and fall in love. But she has an English husband, and he an American wife and child.

What makes this memorable is how it is set against that point in history. We see a former concentration camp guard still expressing rabid anti-semitism, we hear of the trials of leading Nazis, we feel the shards of old Europe splintered all around these characters’ lives. Once, alone with Paul, Sophie’s thoughts turn to the salty tears of the dead and the Dead Sea in Palestine, where "even a dead woman on holiday can float." As the play advances, we see more plainly the huge differences between nations and faiths. It seems eventually that they are sundered as much by history as by their respective spouses.

Pascal’s writing in A Dead Woman on Holiday is not perfect. Sophie is a remarkable character, wonderfully inscrutable and surprising, but there are points when we need more clue to her emotions. And Paul is nebulous figure. But these objections never bothered me much while I watched, because Pascal herself had staged the play so beautifully.

This is the third staging I have seen by her Pascal Theatre Company, and each time I have been unusually moved by the handsome formality of her direction. Basic motionless stance, isolated gestures, and separate pools of light lend the short scenes a peculiar elegance. This modern prose play is so organized in time and space that it acquires the kind of austere beauty and rhetorical tension we associate with the tragedies of Racine.

In A Dead Woman her cast of five has especially fine female acting, with Monique Burg as Sophie the excellently eloquent focal point. I caught it at the Holborn Centre, where Pascal wrought marvels from a very limited space. As Une Morte en Vacances, it will be presented in Maubeuge, France, in November; and next April it will be shown in Paris, along with Pascal’s equally good last play, Theresa.