Theatre review: The White Factory

Created by Russian Jewish theatremakers who've been targeted because of their opposition to the war in Ukraine, Dmitry Glukhovsky's The White Factory looks back at the Second World War, and a group of people whose story I don't think I've seen foregrounded before: You sometimes hear of the Jewish collaborators who helped the Nazis control and eventually round up their own people, in the hope that they and their families might get favourable treatment. They tend to be offered up as a cautionary tale, as their stories generally ended in the concentration camps like everyone else's, but Glukhovsky offers - if not an unquestioningly sympathetic view - a more nuanced one. The story of Yosef Kaufman (Mark Quartley) is equally charged with a steely survival instinct, and crippling survivor's guilt.

We know he's a survivor because his story is bookmarked by scenes in 1960 New York, where the Polish lawyer has moved after the War. Back in Germany, notorious SS Officer Wilhelm Koppe (James Garnon) has finally been caught hiding in plain sight as the sadistic manager of a chocolate factory.

As Koppe goes on trial for war crimes we flash back to Łódź in 1939 and Yosef's encounters with him over the years that he was in charge of the Jewish ghetto there. The officer recruits a community Elder, Chaim Rumkowski (Adrian Schiller) to be his representative, to set up a "Jewish Police" and carry out the Germans' commands. Rumkowski knows he's just there to do the Nazis' dirty work for them, but thinks being a buffer can at least minimise some of the atrocities ahead.

Yosef and his wife Rivke (Pearl Chanda,) meanwhile, take a stand against the invading force for a long time, but when their sons come under threat he relents and joins the Jewish Police. From here on in there's a tight spiral as his self-preservation instinct eventually kicks in so strongly even his family are left behind. Director Maxim Didenko uses a familiar European visual style – all white spaces and live filming projected onto the walls – but the central white box of Galya Solodovnikova’s design splits and slides apart, giving the visuals a disjointed feel and the production its own identity. So do Oleg Mikhailov’s projections, which sometimes put the characters in front of a green screen so they can be flown into the old stories about golems that become a recurring motif.

At its best, the first act of Didenko’s  production strikes an atmospheric balancing act between the emotional depth of the Jewish characters' experience and the chilling pragmatism of Koppe and his henchman Lange (Matthew Spencer) as they matter-of-factly arrange the deaths of thousands of people, many of whom they see and talk to every day. But I booked this show because of the cast, and although they’re predictably great throughout, it’s in the second act where it becomes apparent quite how canny Helena Palmer’s casting is, as they couldn’t be playing more to their strengths. By the end it would be hard to unambiguously call Yosef the story’s hero, but Quartley gives us both the determination and the crushing guilt, that make the character’s actions feel inevitable; Chanda offers a different kind of steady core next to him, and sometimes against him, as Rivke.

Rumkowski is a character with huge amounts of ambiguity and contradiction, so someone like Schiller who can give him immense nuance is also perfect casting: Initially another determined survivor, naïve in hindsight in thinking there could be any leeway in the Nazis’ plans, he tries to keep as many of his people alive by making them indispensable to the Germans as a workforce (the title comes from a bedding factory he set up, where the down from dead Jews’ pillows was used to make new ones for Germans.) This eventually backfires horrifically as Koppe uses this logic to pick off those less able to work – first the old and sick, then the children. Schiller also has to show us Rumkowski as he perhaps takes advantage of his dubious position of privilege, notably in suggestions of sexual impropriety towards the women working for him; before finally being crushed by the full realisation of the Faustian pact he’s made.

And Garnon has an ability to play varying, measured levels of grotesqueness, which here means he can maintain the underlying horror of his character while also (just about) stopping the play from derailing itself at the last minute in an overwrought nightmare sequence. I did find Louis Lebee’s music unhelpfully overbearing at times (and the half-hour of the same few seconds of music being played in a loop before the show started can only be some kind of punishment for people who take their seats early) but for all that elements of the show can seem familiar, the combinations feel new, and The White Factory ends up a moving drama with a perspective that makes it stand out from other Holocaust tragedies.

The White Factory by Dmitry Glukhovsky is booking until the 4th of November at Marylebone Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.