Theatre review: The Pianist

Musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist, the Second World War memoir that was a big literary hit in the 1940s and is most recently known for the Oscar-winning film version, doesn't seem an immediately obvious candidate for a musical adaptation. And while that's largely how it's been marketed, I'd say a musical isn't really what adaptor-director Thom Southerland has delivered either. Wladyslaw (Dan Krikler) is one of four children in a fairly well-off Jewish family in Warsaw, whose comparative privilege allowed them to initially shield themselves from the effects of the Nazis' rise to power: His parents (Rosalind Ford and TJ Holmes) and sisters (Elzbieta Kalicka and Melania Maggiore) as well as, to an extent, Wladyslaw himself, all convince themselves that they've seen the worst of what the Germans are planning to do.

Always a musical family, they largely retreat into music again, but as the Jewish part of town gets walled up into a ghetto and food supplies cut off, his brother Henryk's (Nitai Levi) dire warnings start to come true.

Southerland's high concept for the adaptation is to set the story to Szpilman's own music - inevitably there are a lot of moving dramatic pieces but the main impression that comes across is of the composer's catchy, jazzy pre-War songs that made him a local celebrity, and still stand up today as crowd-pleasers. If part of the show's mission is to restore Szpilman's name as a composer rather than just defining him as a Holocaust survivor then it's successful.

Tonally it's a bit less so, as the attempts to make this an actual musical are inconsistent - the actor-musician cast do well but their breaking into song feels forced, and happens so infrequently that you've forgotten this was meant to be a musical and it becomes jarring. The show is much stronger and more atmospheric when it's a play with music bolstering the story than when it tries to foreground it.

This may be why I liked the second act better, as it settles into a different rhythm when Wladyslaw is left behind when his family are sent off to the camps, rescued from the train at the last minute simply because an officer's a fan of his music. This is where the story becomes uniquely his, with him hiding away in a series of safe houses that never quite turn out to be that safe - only thinking of Szpilman as a survivor might be reductive but it's easy to see how it happened when he so often had a last-second escape from certain death.

Krikler's narration, accompanied mainly by musical director Malcolm Forbes-Peckham on the piano, becomes the main storytelling device, and Southerland's production gets more visually interesting as Krikler clambers over and around the instrument, recounting his many close shaves and eventually an encounter with the one German soldier (Oliver Grant) who defied orders to help him; after the war Szpilman tried, unsuccessfully, to find him and return the favour.

Krikler makes an interesting central figure, his apparent confidence always undercut by a jittery nervous energy that infects the whole production. It's a different energy to the looming dread we might expect from a story about to take on the Holocaust, and an effectively intense one. He barely sings or plays the piano himself, which is another strange creative choice that makes the whole thing feel slightly off, but he definitely brings a kind of vulnerable star quality to a flawed but often effective evening.

The Pianist by Thom Southerland and Wladyslaw Szpilman, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman, is booking until the 28th of November at Park Theatre 200.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Richard Southgate.