Our Class, Cottesloe, National Theatre

Nine years ago, historian Jan T Gross published a book called Neighbours. It chronicled, and tried to analyse the reasons for, the massacre of 1,600 Jews in a north-eastern Polish village, Jedwabne, in July 1941. That was a month after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, into which, in 1939, this bit of Poland had been absorbed by Stalin. The unexamined historical assumption had been that, like so many similar east European communities, Jedwabne simply fell victim to the by then efficiently exercised Nazi lust for Jewish annihilation.

Gross suggested otherwise – that half of Jedwabne’s non-Jewish Polish inhabitants slaughtered the other Jewish half out of a long-held, submerged race hatred whose flames the Nazis were quite happy to have fanned by locals. Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s new play Our Class, based on the Jedwabne episode – and which, opening at the Cottesloe in a translation by Ryan Craig, precedes the Polish premiere by a year – has them blazing in stylised, graphic intensity, a verbal assault on our expectations which, in the play’s first half at any rate, genuinely sears the soul.

Ten classmates – seven men, three women, seated at the start – sing a chirpy song and then stand up, one at a time, childishly to voice their hoped-for careers: as wagon driver, teacher, pilot, soldier. It’s the 1920s, and Polish Jews and Christians are perfectly accustomed to each other; the class is mixed, about half and half.

In a clever reversal of the usual trope, Jews being put upon in their religious observances, Slobodzianek has Christians trying to pray together in class, while the Jews witter on at the back about movies and sex. Division is there but it’s benign. Later things turn toxic under the Soviets, who encourage non-Jews to accuse Jews of, amongst other things, disloyalty to Stalin and sedition. Slobodzianek catches well the crazy factionalism these basically harmless people fall into when driven to define themselves in blindly nationalist or ideological roles.

With the grotesque anti-Semitic licence sanctioned by the Nazis, pillar of the community Katz (Edward Hogg) has his brains dashed out in front of his house and the vibrant – Jewish – Dora (Sinead Matthews), married to a Jew everyone knows and likes but who still has to go into hiding, is gang-raped. Her account of how the 1,600 are then herded into a barn and burnt alive by fellow-villagers is the heart of this truly terrible, and undoubtedly factual, drama; but all the atrocities are described (and mimed, minimally) by the actors. There’s no attempt to bludgeon us with visuals. It’s down to gestural interaction, and it’s both effective and moving.

But things dip in the second half. Instead of trying to answer the question, Why on earth would settled, contented people want to butcher an insanely perceived “other” in their own back yard?, Slobodzianek pursues the ins and outs of post-war marital and other relationships among the class – those who are left – and this I found boring.

The stage is a simple oblong and set not only for a classroom but as if for a court of law: I was waiting, or at least hoping, for scenes of interrogation of witnesses to a monstrous crime. That and to some extent the play itself need judgement. The closest Slobodzianek gets to moral resolution is with an amiable character, Abram (Justin Salinger), escaping early in the play as a trainee rabbi to New York, and whose letters home and questions about what’s going on there have a certain choric usefulness.

Our Class is bold enough, exuberantly played by a committed ensemble and directed with admirable, if sometimes callow, economy by Bijan Sheibani. If finally it fails to trouble and arrest us, that must be because the playwright, however much he will anger his fellow Poles, lacks, technically – I rather hate to use the phrase – the killer instinct.

Our Class is at the Cottesloe until 12 January 2010.

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