Nobody Told Me is a story where the source material is soul material: playwright Luc Albinski’s mother (Wanda, now in her Eighties) and grandmother (Halina) lived in Warsaw before and during the Second World War, with Halina being a wartime doctor, devoted to her traumatised and injured patients – to some degree at the cost of a close relationship with her daughter.
The complexities of Halina and Wanda’s story, taking in the 1930s and the war and a context involving several other individuals, Warsaw’s Jewish community and Nazis on achieving a Final Solution, make for sometimes convoluted storytelling.
Bringing all of this stage is, understandably, a challenge, and a committed cast of ten are tasked with covering a number of bases, with every actor bar Liezl de Kock as Halina playing a number of different roles, including playing items of furniture (one of a number of aspects of post-Brechtian performance techniques included in the direction).
On one scene, real-life events taking several years – such as the tradition of a number of friends and doctors known as ‘Halina’s Talmidim’ (or disciples) meeting once a year at the same bar to toast whatever is most important in that instant – are compressed into one sequence hyphenated by slowed-down interludes in which the actors say “tick-tock” to show the passing of time. Another idea sees Albinski (played by Damon Berry) inserted into the action discussing how he’s telling the story in real time, which allows for the introduction of different locations that might otherwise be difficult to refer to easily in the course of the action. Elsewhere, large segments of dialogue are entirely expository, with a ‘conversation’ being used to elaborate on what action might’ve just taken place or that might be coming up. That helps, to some degree, to bring in details and scope that a theatre stage can’t physically encompass, but it has the effect of making the dialogue sound unnatural which, added to the stylised physical theatre scenarios, makes the characters relatively difficult to engage with as individuals. This in turn means that the story’s milieu – World War Two and the epoch-defining prejudice and violence that came with it – perhaps does most of the work in terms of communicating the trauma the characters experience.
The cast do well to hit the multitude of marks that come with creating and inhabiting rapidly changing sets and locations on (and sometimes off) stage, with quick changes meaning one actor can be a Nazi soldier, then an injured Jewish hospital patient and then a lamp, all in successive short scenes. De Kock gives Halina the gravitas the character requires, helping to suggest the nobility of dedicating her life to her calling while also showing how painful that is for her daughter, whose upbringing is largely left to friends and colleagues. Dihan Keun also brings admirable intensity to his multiple roles and Aimèe Mica Komorowsky delivers, in her character Ela, the counterpoint to Halina’s obsessive ardor – a broken, drug-addicted struggle with a situation nobody should have to face.
The individuals depicted in Nobody Told Me deserve the honour of all the effort put into bringing their story to the stage, a labour of love that is moving in itself. The work of assistant director Renos Spanoudes, choreographer Vicky Friedman and set and lighting designer Wilhelm Disbergen contributes greatly in this regard.