FringeReview UK 2025
As Long As We Are Breathing
Arcola Theatre, Studio 2
Genre: Biographical Drama, Dance and Movement Theatre, Drama, Historical, Immersive, Interactive, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Storytelling, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: Arcola Theatre, Dalston
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“But we’ve got blue eyes and you’ve got black eyes. How is that?” Imagine being opened to yoga breathing, closing your eyes, as a teacher leads you, reluctantly, to the terror that yoga forces her to confront: her childhood. Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Diane Samuels’ As Long As We Are Breathing directed by Ben Caplan plays at the Arcola Theatre, Studio 2 till March 1st.
Samuels, whose 1993 Kindertransport has long been a set text, crafts a multi-sensory history of survivor Miriam Freedman. A quietly riveting wholly factual successor to that earlier work, As Long As We Are Breathing is more intimate, and strikes us individually.
Do see this exceptional and brave piece of theatrical memory.
Review
“But we’ve got blue eyes and you’ve got black eyes. How is that?” Imagine being opened to yoga breathing, closing your eyes, as a teacher leads you, reluctantly, to the terror that yoga forces her to confront: her childhood. Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Diane Samuels’ As Long As We Are Breathing directed by Ben Caplan plays at the Arcola Theatre, Studio 2 till March 1st.
Samuels, whose 1993 Kindertransport has long been a set text, crafts a multi-sensory history of survivor Miriam Freedman. A quietly riveting wholly factual successor to that earlier work, As Long As We Are Breathing is more intimate, and strikes us individually
Freedman herself attended press night. Her story is enacted by two performers. Caroline Gruber interacts with the audience as they file in. Slowly and spellbindingly she spools back through Freedman’s long-established yoga teaching; till we sashay into someone’s very different breath-taking in 1940s Slovakia. Multi-sensory this might be – though the audience isn’t quite asked to adopt yoga positions – though beyond audience experience, the sensory is confined to Matthew James Hinchliffe’s instrumental performance, and Douglas Baker’s video design.
Newcomer Zoe Goriely as Miriam’s younger self responds to Jasmin Colangelo’s movement direction with fantastically dextrous yoga bends and leaps. Narrating Miriam’s younger self – called Eva to fruitlessly disguise her Jewish identity – she takes up Gruber’s gentle authority, and accelerates. Sprinting almost off the stage, scudding to a halt, Goriely spins out a breathless, vehement child’s view. There’s eagerness, bewilderment and terror. Goriely starts wide-eyed. “What colour eyes you have doesn’t matter to me. Does it have to matter to you?” Eva tries washing out her black eyes with soap till they get “flamed”.
As Eva’s eight-strong family in ones and twos migrate to Palestine or Hungary to different fates, or vanish, Goriely shuts off another rose in the cabinet. Threaded through this emerges both the historic reason for Eva, or Miriam’s bad back; and Miriam’s later London encounter with yoga pioneer Irina Tweedie. Seraphic Tweedie, caught on footage and image (with piercing blue eyes) alternates gnomic aphorisms with blunt challenge. She pursues Miriam by not doing so.
On-stage musician and just once a key-jangling Slovakian janitor who risks everything, Hinchliffe accompanies on percussion and clarinet. There’s yoga class thrubs to the clarinet’s klezmer-like whoops and mournings, through siren-wails. Most hauntingly Hinchcliffe rasps through his instrument: breathing meditation and terror. There’s lots of these: a child scampering in the street, a woman meditating in North London; stifling sobs while crushed hidden in a space “the size of a suitcase”. Those who shield them are equally at risk. Finally, as Tweedie insists, there must be reckoning. Can Miriam face that?
Isabella van Braeckel’s costumes and set make one of the best uses I’ve seen of Studio 2’s bare-brick intimate space. Working with Baker’s video design of archival footage, there’s a letter-pasted backdrop; and that haunting use of red roses placed in a cabinet or strewn on the ground. Everything else is beige, vanilla, black or white. Except Tweedie’s unnervingly-enhanced blue eyes. Jon Fiber’s sound works with Hinchcliffe, Tom Turner’s lighting scoops out dark and light, but it’s our own eyes that work with the blanket of the dark.
Slowly perverting laws and neighbours’ reactions, told through a child’s eyes, are blistered through with retrospective outbursts about the priest-PM of Slovakia. By turns harrowing and revelatory, the incremental memory and release is so telling that many didn’t leave their seats for some time after.
Gruber might have made a different impact by herself: one evocative through understatement. Hinchcliffe’s musicianship adds a dimension stronger than any soundscape though, and his contribution especially with clarinet is crucial. Goriely nevertheless seems like an avatar Tweedie summoned and earns Eva’s right to separate from Miriam. Wired to a child’s extremes, her performance is electrifying, the essence of being alive.
This is what could have been snuffed out, and was in 80,000 of 100,000 Slovakian Jews. It’s good to see the antiphonal Eva/Miriam, two contrasting energies but the same person. It distantly recalls what Samuels did with her 2008 play Three Sisters on Hope Street. Over 85 minutes, As Long As We are Breathing though invites us in personally, and that perhaps is the greatest challenge of all. Do see this exceptional and brave piece of theatrical memory.
Producer Sarah Lawrie, Dramaturg Titania Krimpas, Production Manager Lewis Champney, Design Associate Lucy Fowler, Stage Manager Jessica Taylor, Production Assistant Molly Healy, Associate Producer Charlotte Holder, Press & Marketing Elaine Jones, Mobius Industries
