In an era when the slightest misdemeanour can trigger a tsunami of digital outrage, it is bracing to find a play that scrutinises the perilous horns of a very real moral dilemma and gently suggests self-examination might be more fruitful than condemnation.
Blonde Poison tells the story of an assimilated German Jew, Stella Goldschlag, whose fierce will to survive leads her into whole-hearted co-operation with the Nazi's brutally efficient roundup of Jews in hiding from transportation to the death camps.
Elizabeth Hawthorne's performance hauntingly brings to life the unimaginable horror of living under a totalitarian regime bent on mass-murder. With sharp staccato phrases, she recreates the panicked response to a Gestapo raid on a forced-labour factory.
The psychological degradation of torture is evoked with stark poetic imagery and an eruption of raw emotion captures the anguish of a mother having her child ripped from her arms.
Playwright Gail Louw, whose grandparents were killed in the extermination camps, has created a nuanced script that highlights both the necessity and the impossibility of finding an appropriate artistic response to the Holocaust.
