| Evil is done when good men remain silent. This poignant dictum should be written above the doorway of every public office in the land. It is also the core message of Rolf Hochhuth's The Representative - the latest work in the Finborough's Rediscoveries season - which considers the culpability of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in the massacre of some six million Jews during the Holocaust.
This epic drama based around the signing of the Reichskonkordat between the Pope and Hitler was last performed in London in 1963 and it's not hard to see why if Kate Wasserberg's production is anything to go by.
At three hours long, with two intervals and five acts, this play is too long by half and on a sweltering summer's evening in a theatre moonlighting as a hamman, audience attention waned quickly and some even left before the final curtain came up.
Although this horrifying episode in the Catholic Church's history should make for a gripping piece of theatre, this production is an overly didactic turn-off. It would benefit from a sleeker narrative, lacks tension and out of a cast of more than 20 there was only one truly inspired performance, that of David Gershaw as the ghoulish concentration camp Doctor. Everyone else seemed to have set themselves to cruise control, but then maybe they were also suffering in the heat.
The fact that it is performed in-the-round also means that actors are constantly standing with their backs to you, blocking sight-lines and you have to strain to get a clear view of the action.
Oliver Pengelly leads as the young and naive Father Riccardo Fontana, who hopes to incite the Pope to call on the Catholic community to rise up and stem the tied of Nazi violence. But he comes across as a weak, bleating mouth piece and when not supported by an impassioned, varied performance, even the most horrifying death tolls fail to shock or register.
The Representative focuses on Pope Pius XII and the angst of his self serving coteries, who remained silent about the Holocaust and were more concerned with the Vatican's stock holding than the fate of the Jews. However these scenes are deadly dry and lack conviction, and not for a minute do you believe that Simon Molloy, as Pope Pius XII, nor any of his cohorts truly possessed divinely ordained supreme authority, let alone the charisma of leaders. And the fact that Jack Klaff as the Cardinal is played as a wise-cracking Marx brother, seems astonishingly incongruous.
What is of real interest to the audience is curtailed either side of the religious politicking, and concerns the fate of those who were shipped to the concentration camps. The devastating finale scene in Auschwitz, where Father Fontana is reunited with Jacobson (played earnestly and sympathetically by Matthew Bates) a Jewish refugee the young Father thought he had saved, truly broke through the torpor. And this coupled with a barbaric execution and an insight into the devilish mind of the sinister Doctor, gripped the remaining audience during the dying minutes of the play .
The Holocaust must never be forgotten, it was a hideous affront to humanity as was the church's fatal influence on events - it is a story that needs to be told again and again. But it deserves to be told well, and as time progresses on, it needs to be fixed into people's consciences with conviction and passion, which unfortunately this production just didn't do.
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