Polish history, beautifully done - Review: Do Not Forget Me at Stratford’s Bear Pit Theatre
Review: By Peter Buckroyd
Do Not Forget Me, The Bear Pit, until 13th July
TUESDAY saw the premiere of Danny Masewicz’s tender and moving play about the experiences and fate of Polish people displaced between 1935 and 1942. The Copernicana Community Interest Company’s play Do Not Forget Me focuses on one family living in east Poland who were forcibly displaced to labour camps in Kazakhstan.
The play opens with the immediate aftermath of the wedding between aspiring opera singer Alicja and Antoni, a teacher who has joined the reservist army much to the horror of Alicja, now pregnant. Lily Skinner and Elliot Gear make them a lovely couple, doomed from the start like Poland itself.
The oppressive invading Russian regime is represented by Nikolai (Sion Grace), a guest at the wedding and besotted with Alicija, who joins the Russians and eventually leads her and her parents to imprisonment in the labour camps. Danny Masewicz and Emilka Szczepanska give outstanding performances as Alicija’s parents, Monica and Jozef Zebrowski showing the passage of time through posture and movement.
The other characters are Maria, born in Germany and now the ward of Monica and Jozef after her father’s death, and Roza, Alicia’s daughter, representing a different generation, one which sees no wrong in siding with the Russians because that is what she has grown up with.
It is a very clever and theatrical stroke to present the fate of Poles through one family so that the play is imbued with symbolism throughout. Much of the discussion hinges on whether to act or not, and it becomes clear to the audience that if you don’t act you will be acted upon. The play ends with the so-called amnesty created after Russia changed sides in the war.
Elliot Gear skilfully makes Antoni into a shadowy figure, appropriate because he only appears in others’ dreams after they have been imprisoned in the camps. Jozef has the most complex, lyrical and moving part in the play and tears the audience’s heartstrings. His decline into passivity and the self-sacrifice of his wife end the play on a note which resonates for all displaced people.
The play is presented on a stage bare apart from a symbolic tree which captures either growth or hope or firewood. The few props and the changing costumes, designed by Jacquie Campbell and Rebekah Artner, are perfect – clear, purposeful and effectively used, often becoming symbolic themselves.
This is a remarkably good play, beautifully done. I have rarely seen a play work whose writer, director and main actor are the same person. This one certainly does.
The play itself is enhanced by the display of 20 large posters, showing the history of Poland in the war, in the adjoining church, created by the Institute of National Remembrance commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation which is itself a lesson in how to present an exhibition.
