After a good dress rehearsal I invariably find myself in a curiously over-excited state of mind. A brain that's racing after rehearsals is a director's friend since there are always more than enough things to think about to make it worthwhile finding it difficult to relax - and waking way too early the next day creates a useful space. But we're at the point at which, with most things in place, the to-do list suddenly looks reasonable.
So this evening I needed to figure a way to slow myself down and change the subject, just a little. My remedy was a few pages from Wachsmann's KL, and very grim reading they were - as expected, pretty much every page being grim one way and another. There wasn't much in the way of joy in the concentration camps.
But here's the point. Somehow in these darkest of places some decency survived, and it occasionally illuminates a dark page: In summer 1942, when the Ravensbruck SS punished Jews with a month-long cut in rations, another group of prisoners, led by Czech women, regularly smuggled some of their own bread into the Jewish women's barrack. (By the way, to contextualise this, the cut in rations would have spelled certain death for many of the Jewish women, whilst to give up your own bread was to put your well-being in considerable jeopardy.)
What we're putting on stage implies a very bleak account of our fundamental nature, and I think it's important sometimes to represent that kind of ugliness in the theatre because of its truth. (Reading Wachsmann's book will convince you of the truth of our essential ugliness, if you think otherwise.) But it's equally important to recognise other more positive truths. I think they are there in Lady Macbeth. Just difficult to find. As they were in Europe in 1942.
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