Review: ASTORIA, Jack Studio Theatre

Vienna, late 1930s. The fading grandeur of Empire is being polluted by local fascists, but things get real when the Nazis over the border eye an opportunity and Anschluss becomes more than a bad dream and an increasing likelihood. At the Cafe Arkaden, the Jews, Socialists and Communists who meet to write songs and sketches and talk politics realise that their weak defences against the censor (49 seats not 50, so a nod and a wink will suffice) won't work any more. Should they fight back with satire and agitprop or run for safety? Life and death decisions hang in the air.

Tony Britten's play is an homage to Jura Soyfer, a Russian, Jewish, Marxist with an eye for skewering Nazis and their apologists in word and song. He was killed in Buchenwald in 1939, aged 26, leaving behind plays that were smuggled to New York and songs that were sung long after his own death. Britton uses some of that extant material in this production and makes no apology for arrowing in on the parallels with today's politics at home and abroad. As cabaret so often does, it provokes a wan smile at the humour and the warning writ large.

The play itself is tricky to follow easily. Actors play the roles of actors and there's doubling too, so sometimes one can't quite work out if one is in the play within the play or not. That may well mirror the confusion of identities of the characters themselves and comment (in a meta-theatrical style) on Soyfer's mythical nation of Astoria (like Wakanda, it's secretly successful, but unlike Wakanda, it's merely a fallacy even in its own universe). The barbs may strike home more pointedly if one knew exactly where one stood from minute to minute.

The young ensemble cast (helped by some lovely design work by Sorcha Corcoran and Alice Carroll) catch the melancholy of doom in their characters' fates alongside the buoyant optimism of youth. In a moving coda that tells of their fates outside Austria, it's made clear how high was the price paid by those who escaped The Holocaust, something often missed in such narratives.

Joshua Ginsberg, on his professional debut, settled into his role as Soyfer, working best with Taylor Danson's left-leaning English poet, John Lehmann. For a brief time, I wondered if their earnest political conversations about states and revolutions, class and inequality, art and action were a little stilted - and then I recalled my own at their age and they were exactly like that.

Sam Denia brings songs and music to the play, the bite of Cabaret as much in the tunes as in the lyrics. Benjamin Chandler has a sweet tenor and gets most of the laughlines. Olivia Benjamin does some fine accent work and brings real emotion to the role of Helli, Soyfer's committed girlfriend, who could see what might happen to him, but couldn't stop it. Her face in the coda, a heart broken and an eye tearful, represented millions and will stay with me for a long time.

There are many good ideas here and Soyfer's works are clearly relevant today as populist governments around the world flirt with authoritarianism, conjure countries to order (Rwanda is such, in a sense) and mobs riot because right wing governments are not right wing enough for their tastes. There's probably a more user-friendly structure available to mine such material, but this show is radical and different and deserves to be seen by anyone who believes that theatre has a role to play in 21st century politics.

Astoria at the Jack Studio Theatre until 15 April

Photo Credit: Davor Tovarlaza @the_ocular