The flight of Nazis together with Adolf Eichmann to hideouts in Latin America after the second world struggle is effectively documented. Mudar Alhaggi’s drama tells of 1 SS officer who flew east as an alternative, however comes at his life story obliquely.
We hear how Alois Brunner, often called Eichmann’s right-hand man, settled in Damascus and apparently turned a safety adviser to the president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad. He’s drawn as one thing of a state-sponsored fugitive who, ideologically, introduced a bit of the Third Reich with him as he helped to develop Syria’s intelligence system, with its modern-day torture strategies.
Performers Mohammad Alrashi and Wael Kadour, each exiled Syrians, narrate his life but additionally the difficulties round dramatising it. Produced by Collective Ma’louba, that is ostensibly a play searching for a play. We’re instructed that its author, Alhaggi, has now gone lacking and the scraps of his script are what the actors piece collectively earlier than us.
It’s beguilingly naive – the actors inform us they’ll converse and transfer slowly, the surtitles translating their Arabic into English by no means leaving us behind. It’s merely staged, too, with a desk and chairs rearranged to suit scenes in Syria and Germany. However there’s craft in Omar Elerian’s course, which builds intrigue whereas preserving an air of improvisation.
The 2 actors play out flashes of Brunner’s life – as a gruff determine in hospital, or an irascible previous man railing towards Lenin and democracy in a video rental store – however they weave this with the story of their vanished author. Why has he disappeared? Is the ghost of Brunner stalking him? At instances, it verges on postmodern noir.
Uncertainty sits on the core of a tense present wherein you aren’t at all times positive who’s talking. Questions round each males’s lives hold within the air, holding their mysteries as Alhaggi makes an attempt to will get nearer to Brunner.
Their biographical particulars are mixed and typically the author appears to morph into the Nazi. This parallel is confounding at first, however slowly we see how the terrorised are pressured, at all times, to see themselves in relation to their oppressor, though right here it additionally results in a obscure metaphor for the exiled author’s course of. “What stays of theatre while you shouldn’t have a language and lack an viewers?” asks one actor.
At Aviva Studios, Manchester, till 23 March
