He grew up Catholic, certain of his place in the world, until in his twenties he learned that a central part of his identity had been deliberately withheld. He was Jewish, a truth his mother had buried because naming it once meant danger, and later meant complication. Nobody Told Me is the artistic work that emerged from that late revelation. It is not autobiography on stage. It is the reckoning that followed: what it takes to metabolise the truth of a family history that survived only as secrecy.
The play returns to the Warsaw Ghetto, where Dr Halina, the playwright’s grandmother, was a physician. Instead of re-staging historical sequence, Nobody Told Me enters the moral terrain inside it: the impossible medical decisions forced on those who insisted on healing when everything around them was engineered for destruction. The focus is not reconstruction for spectacle. It is the psychological and ethical weight of choosing to keep others alive within a system designed for erasure. Dr Halina remained committed to medicine at cost to herself. Her daughter was moved out of the ghetto for safety — the girl who later became the mother who raised her son Catholic to protect him from the same danger she once lived inside. This is the lineage the playwright inherited without narrative to go with it.
The work arrives at a time when religious identity is again fuelling division and suspicion globally and locally. Antisemitism has surged. So has religion-based contempt more broadly. Identity has become a shorthand for threat, allegiance, moral certainty. And this play arrives with a difficult contemporary question: how can we believe we know who to hate, who to fear, who to categorise when so many people don’t even fully know who they are? When parts of identity can be amputated for survival and passed down as silence?
After several South African Directors declined the opportunity, a Bulgarian Jewish director whose body of work is defined by fearless creative experimentation in film and theatre alike, was chosen. That reluctance is not incidental. It reveals something essential about the work itself: the psychological force of this history is not only backward-looking. It still exerts pressure. It still shapes where we are unwilling to look.
The emotional labour embedded in the writing is evident not in confession, but in restraint. The play does not sensationalise pain. It attends instead to what it means to honour a history that was never permitted to be spoken. In that sense, Nobody Told Me is more than dramatic work; it is an act of ethical acknowledgement: a son making space for a lineage that was silenced because silence once protected life.
Silence of this kind does not simply expire. It leaves a charge in the system. Even when historical facts are suppressed, they continue to shape behaviour, relationship and emotional atmosphere across generations. Nobody Told Me does not claim that naming truth resolves the past but it insists that telling the story matters because not telling it has consequences. And in a world still organised around inherited suspicion and religious certainty, the play suggests that art may be one of the few remaining spaces where we can metabolise what was forbidden to speak – where memory can become meaning, and where meaning can become a form of justice.
When what was buried can finally be spoken, people stop defending and can begin thinking and dialogue becomes the only thing that interrupts repetition.