A woman dances alone to the strains of a waltz. The music becomes menacing. The dance turns to panic and confusion. Julia Pascal’s new dance/theatre piece Theresa which plays the Lilian Baylis for three nights only this week, begins with a kind of dumb show which pre-echoes an appalling vision of what the future will bring for one woman. This is her true story. Theresa Steiner was a Viennese Jew who sought refuge in Britain from the Nazi persecutions. By a trick of fate she ended up on Guernsey where, in 1942, she was betrayed to the Gestapo by the British island authorities.

Truly experimental and truly European, Theresa plays with form on every level, fusing dance with theatre, music with text and juggling fragments of French, German and Polish within a predominantly English script. The effect is always arresting but also serves to make larger points about ‘foreignness’ and ‘belonging’ whether it is experienced by a stateless Viennese refugee or a frustrated upper class Englishwoman emotionally out of sympathy with the interests of her class. As Theresa says, envisaging a future Nazi Europe; ‘there will be no room for our quirky differences.’

Lyn Gardner
City Limits
November 8 - November 15 1990
 

Garage
West Hampstead

A couple of minutes from West Hampstead tube station, this smartly white and high-tech space may once have harboured cars but is now a centre for Jewish Studies organised by the Spiro Institute. For the next two weeks Julia Pascal’s poignant and bitter play is showing here, and the photographic-studio look of the piece (designer: Penny Fitt), lit by high lamps on tripods, gives an aptly nightmarish clarity to the ordeal of Theresa Steiner, born in Vienna, died in Auschwitz.

For 20th-century Jews this turned out to be an all too common lebensbahn, but Theresa’s itinerary takes in the less Channel Islands. She was deported from Guernsey with the connivance, not to say fawning readiness, of British officials, which makes the facts of her story disturbingly close to home. Collaboration is not, after all, limited to foreign breeds.

The first of the play’s three sections opens with Ruth Posner dancing a Viennese waltz. Gradually, while the one-two-three rhythm swoops jauntily on, her arms and posture express alarm, terror and despair. Throughout the play, directed by herself, Pascal uses music to image the surrounding horror and shame. In a scene set after the fall of France, Monique Burg sings Frère Jacques and finds her legs begin to goosestep and the words become the German equivalent.

Dismissed as professor of music, Theresa flees from Vienna to London and finds work as a nanny. When war breaks out her employer, fearing raids on Kensington, takes the baffling decision to escape with her children and Theresa to the supposed safety of the Channel Islands. Bad luck compounds with the pervading cruelty.