The Land of the Living
Since leaving the Young Vic in 2018, David Lan’s canvas may have changed but his principles certainly haven’t. Over 18 years in charge of the inflential Waterloo theatre he programmed bold work founded on unswerving morals, often foregrounding the lives of less fortunate people around the world. In 2021, in his first big project as a free agent, he oversaw the global tour of a huge puppet called Little Amal to highlight the plight of displaced children. And it’s a deep well of empathy that continues here with his first new play in almost 30 years.Set in the immediate fallout of the Second World War, with Germany ‘an open wound’, a worker for an agency called United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration stumbles across a mystery when she and her colleagues are trying to rehome displaced children. There are too many adopted kids in one small town.The reason is the unconscionable Lebensborn programme, Himmler’s invention, which sought to boost the Aryan race by kidnapping ‘perfect’ children from countries including Poland and Ukraine and giving them to Nazi families. Hundreds of thousands of them.Lan constructs a deeply researched, morally complex play based on interviews with journalist Gitta Serreny, who was part of the effort to reunite those children. It focuses on Juliet Stevenson’s idealistic UNRRA worker Ruth and a boy called Thomas who seeks her out many years later to demand answers about his past. Now a worn journalist, Ruth comes clean, summoning the...
