FringeReview UK 2024

Blonde Poison

TROUPE Theatre and Abrahmase and Meyer Productions.

Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre

Venue: The Playground Theatre, Latimer Road W10 6RQ

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Gail Louw’s International Season of four plays at the Playground Theatre begins with her acclaimed 2011 Blonde Poison, directed by Fred Abrahmase and starring Fiona Ramsay till March 3^rd.

Director and lighting designer Abrahmase, and set designer Marcel Meyer are, like Ramsay, from South Africa, where Louw still has deep roots. Her experiences there must constitute part of what erupts as a moral force in her historically-based plays and monologues.

Stella Goldschlag is 72. It’s 1994 in Germany and she invites you to admire her figure and great teeth. You’ll fall in love with her she says. Men always have. Jewish but so blonde.

Not like those dark eastern Jews with ringlets. Cultural fissures between assimilated and migrant Jews, something not at all confined to Stella, crack infinitesimally like Dresden china skin.

Stella too is exercised with exactly the right time to put on the coffee for her visitor. Never overboil to make a good impression.

Meyer’s set, a stark white strip ascending vertically upstage is partially bisected by a gold and white period chair: that like Stella has seen days with less rubbed-off gilt. And Stella’s fashioned in white too, up to her turban. Abrahmase’s lighting plays on sheer dazzle.

A man of 70 who used to sing with Stella in a choir is asking to interview her. So many have, but he knew her when they were children. Why does he so disturb her? After all their wealthy family got out in 1937. The Goldschlags weren’t so rich, or so lucky.

But this now-respected journalist offers Stella a final chance to explain herself. Her choices, her redemption from a past when she did what she did to adapt, and survive. Accused of worse than collaboration, Stella lets us know it’s not so simple.

Unleashing a Jewish-German accent (though she’s in her native Germany) Ramsay drawls us into Stella’s narcissistic world, adored and loved: arty (fashion-drawing), declaring she could have been a singer, sexually adventurous, threatened by the family’s paying so much to escape and not.

Stella’s Muti and Fati – who composes less-than-inspired lieder and is despised even by his wife for not knowing how mediocre they are – want above all for Stella to thrive. Not that her father condones Stella’s love of singing jazz. Mozart, Shubert, Schumann, Brahms: they’re culturally German. That won’t save them.

The Goldschlags’ options seem narrow: hiding, or compliance with a death-sentence. Blonde Stella’s choices widen, especially with blond Jewish Hans, where they can cut a figure and pass, much as some Black women were able to ‘pass’ in segregated America: though with even direr consequences on discovery. Stella’s explicit in her delight with Hans, less so with what happens when she’s picked up.

Stella charms men doing dangerous work. Some are reckless though she does her best to warn. Capture of Jewish people in Hamburg wasn’t so simple either, even when detained. Imprisoned, they might be killed or escape when allied bombs flatten their prison. Stella admirably trudges to find her parents in another prison and stays with them.

Much in this narrative – like visceral torture-scenes – shiver any peremptory judgement apart. Though more is coming. “Blonde poison” she’s called. And that’s by her admirers. Stella’s charming, funny, cutting and asks us: what would you do to survive?  Wouldn’t you feel monumentally guilty, whatever you chose?

And does that run to knowing the whereabouts of 3,000 ‘Untergetauchter’ or ‘submarines’, as Stella herself has been till now? And doesn’t Hans have more to answer?

The intricate but compelling narrative, the occasional accusatory tones of a daughter living in Israel and the stark sound of a train chuffing into the distance, all are carved out of the blank egg-white of memory.

Ramsay gradates Louw’s unspooling of Stella – and Stella’s hastily re-spun suppression – with glacial charm and a dart or two of displacement.

Conveying Stella’s mix of heedless narcissism Ramsay moues with outrage, flashes innocence and pouts complicity, relays Stella’s selfless acts of loyalty and frank disclosures: how can we not adore a woman who so revels in her sexual beauty?

That though, was in another country. They do things differently there. “If you can, you do. If you can’t, you don’t cry.”

There’s still choices ahead. At 64 minutes, rather than the billed 80, it seems there’s some elision and occasionally a jump-cut that with pure storytelling needs filling (the fate of one lover for instance).

The production though and Ramsay reign supreme, and there’s a new light on the very end. It says something for Louw she can draw a team of such stature, celebrated in South Africa.

Louw is indeed, as others claim, manifesting a genius for flawed historical one-person monologues like The Good Dad seen here in November: though some of Louw’s finest works are ensemble plays.

Next week is the first of three world premieres: Rika’s Rooms, adapted from Louw’s first novel of 2022 and based round a woman’s fractured memory of Germany, Palestine and South Africa. Following that and for two weeks, The Girl in the Green Jumper, a tender two-hander where a self-appointed muse and her much older painter meditate on their inspiration. Finally Storming! addresses US proto-fascism.

An outstanding production.

Published March 2, 2024March 2, 2024 by Simon Jenner