FringeReview UK 2026
The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940
Arcola Theatre, Dalston with Pascal Theatre Company
Genre: Biographical Drama, Costume, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Historical, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: Arcola Theatre, Studio 2
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Hannah Arendt’s fate and that of other women at France’s infamous Camp Gurs for women only is treated in a theatrically visceral new play with an awkward title. Julia Pascal’s The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940, directed by Pascal plays at the Arcola’s Studio 2 till November 7.
Enthralling, engrossing, emotionally exhausting. Above all it’s a darkly theatrical must-see.
Review
May 5 1940. Three women already find themselves in political limbo. France hasn’t fallen but the French seem already eager to round up German Jewish refugees to hand over. The voice of one rings with phrases we still hear. Though not: “Are there still swallows chattering in your courtyard?” Hannah Arendt’s writing to her lover Martin Heidegger: “You love a Jew, and you join the Nazi party.” Arendt’s fate and that of other women at France’s infamous Camp Gurs for women only is treated in a theatrically visceral new play with an awkward title. Julia Pascal’s The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940, directed by Pascal plays at the Arcola’s Studio 2 till November 7.
Pascal rightly feels the need to redress male accounts of the Holocaust with a wholly women-focused play and all-female cast. Though the play focuses on the fates of three historical women – Hannah Arendt (Mai Weisz) the eldest at 33, 16-year-old schoolgirl Eva Daube (Ariella Barnett), and 23-year-old Charlotte Salomon (Anna Eckhard) – Pascal draws in other figures: obstetrician Agathe (Helen Goldwyn), and uneducated sexually roving tailor Trude (Pat Dynowska). Eva’s elder communist half-sister Trude is conflated with Eva.
Arendt writes to others on May 5: “First get past the Nazis. Second get past the British. If we are attacked as Jews, we must fight back as Jews.” Arendt’s already smuggled Jewish children to British-occupied Palestine: that 1923 Mandate wibbling for 30 years over two states and granting neither. Yet Arendt eschews Zionism, and her new Communist friend Eva scorns it, probing Hannah in a fierce political debate. “She’s a dreamer” Agathe dismisses debate altogether. Their artist friend Charlotte sidesteps it, gazing into the middle distance.
In twenty-three scenes including two epilogues Pascal crafts a straight-through chronological account, partly gleaned from Arendt, but also from others she details, citing too diaries lost as recently as 2005. Being Pascal she breaks this up with choric interludes, singing and blisteringly physical acting: the women all exploding with dysentery in buckets. Or Charlotte illustrating what Agathe does medically by lying on her back, opening her legs and laconically transmuting it to art: Courbet’s ‘The Origin of the World’. Agathe herself suffers most from these conditions, and the mud: Goldwyn producing an agonising moment. This almost Brechtian ensemble-work reaches back to an often more exciting theatrical era. It informs many of Pascal’s best plays; so it proves here. History is shivered through, events and premonitions stamped with explosive moments and proleptic tugs on the audience’s shoulders of what happens next.
There’s a structural advantage, but also challenge in this chronological traversal, designed not to give spoilers. A certain shaping and dovetailing, swooping in and out of narrative, might have rendered the play more airborne. That isn’t Pascal’s way, and it’s already clear she does inject the work with grim humour; and timeless outtakes in song or choric ferocity.
The everyday life is punctuated with internal dramas, the “thief in the night” (it’s bread), one inmate’s trial and possible punishment, the recruitment of one adversary as reluctant defence lawyer. In all these Pascal leans on Arendt’s account of Arendt in charge, though also challenged by others. Pascal shrewdly outlines how Arendt – clearly the intellectual leader – fashions herself as self-appointed conscience too. So Arendt is necessarily freighted with the weight – here – of what we know she becomes: the coiner of “the banality of evil” and amplifier of Theodor Adorno’s contested theory of “the authoritarian personality” amongst so many other things. And struck through, the memory of her now Nazi lover. When at one key moment Arendt realises the only way to keep up the women’s spirits is invoking memories of sex, you get a sense of just how conflicted this was for her.
From Scene 13 on, only one thing dominates: how to escape, after France has fallen. They’re relatively near the Spanish border (well 400 miles). Who will go, who will stay, who will come halfway but cannot tear themselves from France because of loyalty to a sexually abusive grandfather? In scenes of varying length and coruscating wit, Pascal plots the plan through the everyday banality of survival.
Composer/arranger Anja Fahlenkamp plays ensemble parts and leads the a cappella singing throughout in a work pointedly haunted with German music that’s part of the sound design: Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto No. 5 (the emperor who gave Jews equality under the Code Napoleon as Hannah points out); Schubert’s song ‘Death and the Maiden’ (of course). Fahlenkamp gives Eckhard Bach’s heartbreaking song ‘Bist du bei mir’ (“If you are with me, I go with joy” which he lifted and ‘improved’ from Gottfried Stolzel’s Diomede). Pascal’s and Fahlenkamp’s choices are never accidental. And there’s touches of Weimar-esque cabaret.
The cultural tearing, the homesickness for a Germany that wants to exterminate these women is repeatedly borne out every time the ensemble sings, which it does often. All six prove consummate singers, Fahlenkamp and Eckhard in particular.
These are voices rising above the casual banality, or eruptions of anti-Semitism two characters encounter late on in Marseilles, led by a seething Goldwyn. It’s the reason many chose to stay in the camp: they rightly feared hostility from the peasants, and felt safer waiting for the Germans. When it comes to rich cultural traditions (if one can put it like that), Pascal spares the French as little as she rightly flays the British. Not that she spares her characters either.
Weisz anneals Arendt’s authority with a slight half-turn and measured cut-through voice. Eckhard’s Charlotte is superbly numinous, close to Fahlenkamp, yet surprisingly earthy on occasion and the most radiant. Barnett’s darting, funny yet inquisitorial Eva is full of dialectic nagging; but shows she can turn it on herself. Dynowska’s mercurial Trude is all savvy evasiveness with a swing of sensuality. Goldwyn’s characters exude a bluntness stripped of illusion, hope and latterly charity.
Arcola’s Studio 2 can test set designers, but some triumph. Here simplicity works, with items hung on the upstage brick wall, emphasis given to costumes and simple props like buckets, sheets of paper, brooms, headscarves and dungarees. Carmen Neat’s set with Lesley Lightfoot’s costume designs and supervision (aided by Neat) is lit cleanly by Tony Simpson.
The Banality of Evil throughout its straight-through 90 minutes is enthralling, engrossing, emotionally exhausting. Yes it can occasionally feel like one damn thing after another: but Pascal is as inventive as one can be in the straight-through chronological telling she lights on. You feel Arendt would have tolerated nothing else. Above all it’s a darkly theatrical must-see.
Assistant Director Andrius Maksimavicius, Stage Manager (on Book) Naomi Shanson, Production Electrician Tyler Forward, Stage Management Placement/ASM Poppy Stewart. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner.
Associate Producer to Pascal Theatre Company Susannah Kraft-Levene, Dramaturgy Andrea Nouryeh, Marketing Executive for Pascal Theatre Company Natalie Borenstein.
