Review: THE BANALITY OF EVIL: HANNAH ARENDT, FRANCE, 1940, Arcola Theatre

It’s quite the phrase, ‘The Banality of Evil’, and there’s a little joke about its persistence in this play’s epilogue that nods towards that status. I had come across it briefly as a student and then had its most terrifying manifestation driven into me not long after, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, the obsessive paperwork on show making industrial scale murder just another process that, these days, would be included in a list of jobs threatened by AI.

Primo Levi caught some of the routines in his harrowing If This Is a Man, and Martin Amis went further in his novel, The Zone of Interest. But it was Jonathan Glazer’s film of the same name that was the most shocking, its portrayal of business as usual with screams audible from behind the walls and smoke billowing from a chimney, hideously on point.

These creatives are all men, the phrase was coined by a woman, Hannah Arendt, a leading figure in 20th century political philosophy, a bundle of contradictions and a survivor, at least until tobacco did what the Nazis and Pétain’s goons could not. 

It’s quite a life and we get some of it in Julia Pascal’s new play that focuses on Jewish women, already fleeing from the Blitzkrieg’s rampage across Europe, who were seized in May 1940 and sent from Paris to a concentration camp at Gurs near the Spanish border.

Mai Weisz gives Arendt the alpha female authority she would have had in her mid 30s, educated and successful and a woman very much with her own mind. Her longstanding working and romantic relationship with the Nazi-philosopher (or philosopher-Nazi, as some might phrase it), Martin Heidegger, and her shifting position on Zionism, complicated her reactions to the Vichy regime. But the country all the women loved was now gone beneath the jackboot, slicing off the greater part of their German-Jewish identity. You can see the thoughts that led to her later works formulating in real time, especially in her reaction to the hate exhibited by the French peasantry near the camp. 

Charlotte Salomon, murdered at Auschwitz at 26 FFS, is in the same crowded hut. She is the painter of the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person killed in The Holocaust, and is played with a seething detachment by Anna Eckhard. Eva, a composite character, is a communist, a true-believer in simple answers (as so many teens are) and is lent a winning naivety by Ariella Barnett.

We see much of the routines the women need to adopt to survive in the conditions, rats scurrying in the night, the demands of basic hygiene anything but straightforward and the fragile trust that has to be built (easy) and maintained (harder) when living on the edge of malnutrition, bereft of sufficient food, water and sex.

This leads to an unnecessarily long quasi-trial, with Doktor Arendt in the judge’s chair, which may allude to her celebrated work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,  that gave the play its name, but slows the narrative and deflects us from following the women’s struggle.

In fact, due to the Brechtian approach Pascal adopts, we do not really get to know the women at all, most more types than believable persons, more the sum of their experiences (a gynecologist, a sex worker, an opera singer) than rounded individuals. We are held at a distance, the play also using songs to venture towards the surreal. What emerges is an abstraction of something that is, admittedly, hard in more ways than one to envisage.

For all the play’s arm’s length approach to the dread word relatability, and the gnawing sense that there are more interesting experiences to relate just out of sight, its relevance in London, right now, could hardly be greater. 

Opening night’s morning brought news that a major political party planned to deport 90,000 asylum seekers, including women and children, should they gain power. We know exactly what that will require and we know, from Hannah Arendt, that those who will implement it will not all be in black shirts and balaclavas. Many will be in suits and drive Ford Mondeos to the recycling centre. 

That’s all you need.  

The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940 at Arcola Theatre until 7 November

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