“A courageous attempt to Arendt through Brechtian techniques”
In May 1940, three German Jewish women are arrested at Camp Gurs in France: Hannah Arendt the political thinker, Charlotte Salomon the artist, and Eva Daube the communist. Drawing on archival research, Julia Pascal’s The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940 explores their experiences of imprisonment and survival. However, despite the richness of its historical material, the production raises considerably more questions than it manages to explore.
At the heart of the problem is Pascal’s treatment of Arendt herself and her concept of the banality of evil, from which the production takes its title. Different from the conventional understanding of evil as a product of obedience to bureaucratic authority, Arendt argues that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness resulted from his conviction to the Nazi movement and its ideological framework that formed the meaning of his life, where he gave away independent thinking and moral judgment. His administrative competence coexisted with an extraordinary incapacity to interrogate the assumptions that governed his actions.
This is closely related to Arendt’s distinction between solitude and loneliness. For Arendt, thinking requires solitude: a dialogue with oneself in which established convictions can be questioned and dismantled. Loneliness, by contrast, deprives the individual of this internal dialogue, making the certainty and belonging offered by an ideological movement especially seductive. This also gives the banality of evil its contemporary relevance. In our own times, there is a kind of micro-fascism living in our bodies through which we internalise, invest in, and even come to desire the ideological and administrative orders that suppress us.
Unfortunately, little of this is explored in Pascal’s production, not even the more conventional dimension of banality of evil. We all know that theatre is not a Hollywood film, and we are not expecting Arendt, as the hero, to receive her “transformational arc”. Nevertheless, taking this title, we are sure to expect that what happens to her onstage should embody something of who she is, and what informs her thinking on that concept. However, rather than interweaving the historical material to achieve this, the production offers a rather stale bread-stealing and trial plot which fails to turn a Victor Hugo question into one of Hannah Arendt’s.
Similarly, Arendt’s complicated attitude to Zionism is not embodied but simply stated as”not black and white”, without demonstrating why and how it is not. While writing extensively about Jewish loss of language and home in We Refugees, I could hardly imagine that she would have expressed herself in such a Shylock-like manner as she does in this production. Even in its exploration of her identity as a German Jew, the script fails to offer much depth.
The production is scattered with references to her book titles, her relationship with Heidegger and her early life stories, but they contribute surprisingly little to her portrayal as a person, nor evoke much of her thinking. The same applies to the other two women. Eva is portrayed rather flatly young and naive, and for sure Marxist thought is hardly given any space. Neither is there anything substantial about the value of art through the story and lenses of Charlotte Salomon, let along the dynamic between the three. Dramaturgically, they are never solidly established. That is why the real questions and issues – the banality of evil, the role of communism, the value of art, and their relations – cannot be properly provoked or answered.
As a result, all the Brechtian devices – jazz, cabaret, montage of sleep-talking, demonstrating not becoming characters, and the breaking of the fourth wall – remain Brechtian merely in form, appearing to produce alienation without real knowledge or critical reflexivity. Similarly, while the production seems rich in directorial choices including ensemble acting (Ariella Barnett, Pat Dynowska, Anna Eckhard, Anja Fahlenkamp, Helen Goldwyn, Mai Weisz), cross-cutting, verbatim and a variety of non-representational elements, it lacks the overarching dramaturgical flesh and bone. Instead, it feels like a mash-up driven at a relentlessly tight pace with little breathing space, leaving little to linger in either the mind or the heart.