Review: FLEW THE COOP, New Diorama Tristan Bates Theatre

Perhaps not all Nazi internments camps were the living hells searingly described by Primo Levi in If This Is A Man or given visual illustration in the nightmarish Son Of Saul. PG Wodehouse, a man who seldom wore a hat at less than a jaunty angle, described his spell in Silesia as follows:

"There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side."

Of course, Wodehouse was vilified for such levity in his infamous Berlin broadcasts, but (as is always the case) it's worth going back to the source itself and deciding just how big a (can one call it such?) lapse in taste those broadcasts were.

Controversy of a different kind attaches to the story of camp barber, Horace Greasley, also interned in Silesia, also under a Nazi jackboot with an unlikely cushioned heel. He claimed to have slipped out of his camp to meet young Silesian translator, Rosa Rauchbach, for assignations, chicken kidnapping and turning up turnips more than 200 times during the war. It's a story that's been challenged - not unsurprisingly.

That's all neatly sidestepped by Lost Watch Theatre Company's Flew The Coop, who tell us straight off the bat that it's a true story - except for the bits they made up. The young ensemble of five play all the parts and use a collection of brooms, mops and buckets to conjure everything from a barber's chair to a bombed out church. They also represent sexual intercourse with an extremely energetic dance that would have made Hot Gossip blush and is very funny - though perhaps not third time round.

It's all rather charming, if a little far-fetched on the details (not sure that any camps had flush toilets for prisoners) and, if it could do with a little less shouting, there's enough moments of Nazi brutality to show that, despite the costumes, it was no Boy Scouts' jamboree in the forests of Southern Poland. There's a smattering of somewhat anachronistic music to accompany all the energetic charging about on stage, and I confess to raising a wry smile when what sounded like a New Order track was playing.

Greasley gets home and lives on into his 90s, but his Rosa is never found again. She explains to us that Allied Forces would consider her German and Axis Powers would consider her Polish (and possibly discover her concealed Jewish roots) It's a fate of many Silesians, a people sometimes ruled by Czechs, sometimes by Germans and sometimes by Poles, their lands a political football in Mitteleuropa for centuries.

It's an interesting, if insubstantial story - much time is spent on an account of acquiring headphones for a clandestine radio, a dangerous thing to do, but lacking the life or death urgency of finding and keeping shoes in Auschwitz, as described by Primo Levi. The show is an hour long curio really and will probably lead to more developed work from this company in the future.

Flew The Coop continues at The New Diorama Theatre until 4 March.

Photo Richard Davenport

To post a comment, you must register and login.