The search for truth lies at the centre of Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s Pulitzer-nominated play, which follows archivists at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as they study, dissect, and agonise over a mysterious photo album donated in 2007.
The images in the album show Nazis at Auschwitz not as overt monsters, but laughing, relaxing, and picnicking – the suggestion is that, in private, they were, unsettlingly, just like us. What follows is a forensic unpicking of history, as the archivists attempt to identify the faces in the photographs, grapple with the moral implications of exhibiting the album in a memorial museum, and reassess how we confront and interpret the legacy of the Nazis.
But, sitting in the audience, I can’t help but wonder: is a play the best place to hash all these big ideas out? Based on real-life events and told in documentary style, the narrative unravels like a puzzle being slowly put together. The facts are presented statically, in a new UK production also directed by Kaufman, but some of the much-needed momentum is lost along the way. Projected across the theatre’s back wall, the photographs function as visual evidence – figures are circled, details enlarged, and key faces isolated for scrutiny. Set primarily in the back room of a museum, with desks glowing under sterile light, the staging moves at the slow pace of a genuine investigation.
Perhaps that is the point. But after 90 minutes, the structure begins to wear thin. For much of the running time, we are essentially listening to a lecture delivered by Philippine Velge, who plays the young curator leading the inquiry, Rebecca Erbelding. Her tone is informative, but remains one-note and, weirdly, detached throughout. While the photographs – which made headlines around the world – are chilling, there comes a point at which no further drama can be wrung from two-dimensional images.
There is a problem, too, with the voices of the victims largely being omitted. When we finally do hear from one Auschwitz survivor, it is a haunting, painful testimony. We need more of this in a play that is weighed down in process. Even when the grandson of one of the Nazis in the photos decides to locate other family members and eventually meets the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the emotion seems secondary to the existence of the photographs.
Many of the themes here are worthy of interrogation: generational trauma, the limitations of history, and how we engage with the atrocities of the past. But, despite its subject matter, the play feels sterile, cold and emotionally airless. Historians may be required to maintain professional detachment, but in the theatre we should not be held at such a distance.
