Edinburgh Fringe 2026
A Woman in Berlin 1945
Teatro Fisico
Genre: Physical Theatre
Venue: Fruitmarket
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Berlin. April 1945. As the Red Army storms the city, a young woman finds herself trapped in the wreckage of a collapsing society. Her testimony reveals the mass violence inflicted on German women in the final weeks of the war.
Review
A Woman in Berlin 1945 is not simply a history lesson. It is a closely observed portrait of endurance, compromise and the terrible adjustments ordinary people make when survival becomes the only option.
There is a helpless agony in watching your life slip away as everything you ever knew is ripped from you. The conquering enemy takes what it wants from those who have already lived through years of fear and deprivation. Magda Pohl’s emotional portrayal of a woman desperate to survive exists on two levels: the directness of spoken testimony and the expressive force of physical movement. Her body can express what language cannot, tightening, folding and bracing itself against memories.
Tom Corradini’s Teatro Fisico is a company focused on Lecoq-style performance, and that discipline gives the production another tool to reach the audience. Fine physical work is showcased throughout the piece, giving Pohl the additional palette to express the agonies of war when mere words do not suffice.
We learn how the German population, mostly women and old men, struggled against the indignities inflicted on them, searching for ways — and reasons — to carry on. Food shortages were everywhere, looting was rampant, and sexual violence became another tool used to dominate a defeated population. While one million Russian women served in the Red Army, two million German women were raped following the fall of the Reich. The production doesn’t soften these realities, but avoids reducing its central figure to a helpless victim. What emerges is a woman calculating, adapting and enduring under conditions in which dignity itself has become precarious.
Pohl gives an empathetic, controlled performance in her second, or possibly third, language. There are moments when the phrasing feels slightly restrained, but this suggests a that she’s choosing her words carefully because every word carries consequence. I feel I would have understood the story just as well had she performed in her native German.
In the end, while to the victors go the spoils, the vanquished are left to fend for themselves, and the best they can do is pretend to be happy. A Woman in Berlin 1945 is deliberately uncomfortable theatre. Pohl and Corradini remind us that history is measured differently by those that live through it.
