Following a sell-out, Scotsman Fringe First award-winning Edinburgh premiere, the debut work from Filipa Bragança Award-nominated artist Beth Paterson makes its London premiere! Niusia was a Holocaust survivor. She saved people’s lives in the camps, set up a new life for her family as a refugee, and was an iridescent entertainer. But her granddaughter, Beth, only remembers an angry, dying woman. She’s ready to learn her stories, but what she discovers is all the questions she didn’t know existed (and wasn’t allowed to ask).
Review by Stephen Gilchrist
This show is about identity. Not just that of the writer/performer, but the identity of all of us who are shaped by the experiences of our forebears, our parents, and our grandparents, and how through our history we are sometimes cast into the role of, to quote Moses, a ‘stranger in a strange land’.
Beth Patterson, who has written and performs this one woman play, is Jewish’, and somewhat cultural remote from her faith legacy. She is a spider’s web of contradictions. Niusia was her grandmother who survived Auschwitz having been forced to serve as a nurse to the infamous Joseph Mengela, saving lives and having married, after the war, surfaces in Melbourne as a refugee.
She, herself, is a contradiction to the author. Energetic, but bitter, cruel and angry as she is described, but often engaging and never, it seems, a complete person. She refuses to ta talk about her experiences and so her history is communicated through the writer’s mother, Suzie, whose interpolated voiceovers punctuate the narrative.
But this play is not just about identity. It is about memory, and those memories which help us to find our place in the world and those which remain to torment us. This is a very personal piece and I could not help bringing my own life experiences to my critique. I am Jewish. My grandparents fled persecution in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the last century. But members of my extended family were murdered in the Łódź ghetto. I have known Holocaust and camp survivors and I find the author’s writing to be totally authentic.
Beth Patterson is an extremely talented writer and a fine actress. She also has a great voice as bursts unexpectedly into ‘Blue Moon. She has charm and her writing is brim-full of humour as well as pathos. She has more than one twinkle in her eye, as she pokes fun at herself and her Jewishness. But despite her proclaimed ignorance of the nitty gritty of her legacy faith, she also displays wisdom and knowledge. There is an indelible pride within her, of who she is, and who she wishes to be.
This show is only sixty minutes long but there is a power within it that makes it difficult to put out of one’s mind. The direction by Kat Yates is spot on. The set is strewn with books, those which Patterson has read to understand her ethnic inheritance. Sometimes, they are opened, sometimes thrown about in anger. Patterson is a writer/performer in search of herself. We the audience are also invited to look for ourselves through our back story and to understand both ourselves and those who made us who we are. Beth Patterson’s Niusia is a compelling story of love and of legacy, but most of all it is a testament to the truth of how we are who we are. Outstanding.
Cast
- Beth Paterson — Performer / Cast
Creatives
- Beth Paterson — Writer
- Kat Yates — Director
- Ryan Stewart — Producer
- Tiah Bullock — Production Manager
- Sidney Younger — Lighting Designer
- Jack Burmeister — Sound Designer
- Samantha Hastings — Set & Costume Designer
