Two
By Ron Elisha
The Stage Company
The Space

Two, the Adelaide Stage Company’s latest production, examines the contrary states of the human soul. The play is set in Germany in 1948 and writer Ron Elisha uses two characters – a rabbi, Chaim Levi, and his pupil, Anna, to describe the experience of the Dachau death camp.

Elisha has set himself a formidable task with a subject which inevitably unleashes enough detail and associations to overwhelm players and audience alike.

Aware of this, he narrows the action to a series of Hebrew lessons given by the rabbi instead of his usual music lessons. In fact music and language begin to overlap as the rabbi teaches Hebrew script like musical notations and as the music of Beethoven substitutes for prayer in his desolate life.

Indeed, if the play had confined itself to Judaic instruction for an idealistic young woman from a middle-aged survivor of Dachau, Elisha would have powerfully directed attention to his theme by never actually addressing it head on.

Instead, there is a succession of dramatic revelations – Anna is not a Jew, she is a former SS guard from Dachau, then she is a Jew after all. Then, we are told she is also a prostitute. By this stage we start to wonder whether she has links with the royal family as well.

In contriving these turns of the plot the playwright makes it almost impossible for the characters to realign. We can understand why the rabbi would want to pulp Anna’s kidneys (although the actors looked most embarrassed feigning a punch up) but we cannot understand how he would ever reconcile with an SS guard who fed chocolates to children on their way to the shower blocks.

The paradox of the pupil instructing the teacher, the Nazi redeeming the Jew is simply too pat. When the play talks about corporate guilt – how there can be no saints while there is one atom of evil in the world – it is mistaken.

Saintliness has no meaning if there is no evil to confront. The play too easily subsumes ethical questions of conduct and ·responsibility and the writer is too preoccupied with the fearful symmetry of his play’s opposites to consider the more likely irrationalities of human response.

As Chaim, John Noble wisely resists the temptations of Topol. His performance is wryly understated in the opening scenes but as the play unravels both he and Deborah Little as Anna lose focus and conviction as the impulse to melodrama becomes stronger.

Sue Rider’s direction is best when it is spare- as indicated by the crispness of the blackboard scenes. In contrast, though, the use of a spotlight transfiguring the actors miming violins and piano performances is ponderous and banal.

Similarly the huge, tonal drop-out photographs of bombed-out buildings detract from the simplicity of the set and are partly obscured for all but those in the centre seating.

Two is a potentially disturbing play but it does not sustain the literate subtlety of its opening scenes and when opting for more scope in Act 2 the players relinquish most of what they have gained.

The National Times, May 3, 1985, p.35.