I had a good feeling about A Bodin Saphir's Rosenbaum's Rescue but I certainly didn't expect to come away convinced it was one of the best plays I've ever been privileged to see in my entire life. I laughed, I wept, I had both my presumptions and prejudices questioned and challenged, and I even managed to learn a little bit about the history of Denmark during World War II.
My hopes were met easily - and then exceeded. Set over the course of two cold nights in 2001 in Abraham and Sara's remote Danish house, the observant Jew and his 'Swedish' wife welcome their old friend Lars and his grown up daughter Eva to a night of drinks and Scrabble. Their history, it is apparent from the very start, goes back a very long way - and is very checkered. Just how much so will unravel as the play develops.
The catch-up soon develops into an, at times, heated discussion about the evacuation, and rescue, of most of the Danish Jewish population in 1943, following an order from Adolf Hitler that they should all be arrested, deported, and 'processed'. Remarkably, I was unaware of this (true) story beforehand and on its own it would have made for a compelling and emotional drama. But Bodin Saphir's play delves into his own family's personal experiences and, in the character of historian Lars, seeks to uncover the truth of what really happened during that whole episode. It may not have been exactly as the record books claim.
The exchanges between all four characters never forget to put the personal into the political but in a style that may be familiar to admirers of the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, the story is peppered with revelations of an entirely personal nature. Be they as quotidian as fixing a broken pipe, lighting the candles for Hanukkah or others, far more earth shattering, that I shall not reveal. Spoiler alerts and all that.
As each plot twist reveals new layers to each character you find your sympathy continually switching around the stage (a fairly straightforward set up, one front room, one kitchen) from Abraham to Lars to Eva and back to Sara. In a tightly plotted two hours, the script manages to touch on, even go quite deep into, subjects as various and vital as sexuality, nationhood, faith (or lack of it), immigration, memory, religion, our sense of identity, and the fragile nature of the male ego.
The way Abaraham and Lars deal with their occasionally bruised pride is an important part of the make up of Rosenbaum's Rescue but it is the eloquent dialogue that elevates this play above so many others. Exposition is only provided when absolutely necessary, elsewhere we're given the responsibility of thinking for ourselves, and there's barely an ounce of fat on a single line spoken by any character. If only exchanges between me and my family were this neat.
As Abraham, David Bamber has the nebbishness down to a level I'd almost consider a cliche if it wasn't for a loud Jewish lady regularly squealing with recognition a few seats along from me, and Neil McCaul plays Lars as one of those haughty, I know best, intellectuals whose disdainful manner tends to make more enemies than it wins arguments, it's safe to say he is a man who does not wear his education lightly.
Dorothea Myer-Bennett, like everyone else, is excellent as Eva, the somewhat estranged daughter of Lars who, by dint of her German mother, identifies more as German than Danish. She's articulate, learned, and yet eager to learn and listen at all times. Julia Swift's Sara, too, has to occasionally make do with standing to the side while the men verbally duke it out. That's not to belittle her role but to comment on how accurate an observation of married life Bodin Sapher was able to conjure up. Swift, for the record, was brilliant.
But, ultimately, each of the four cast members owe an enormous debt to Alexander Bodin Saphir who not only taught me who Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz and Karl Rudolf Werner Best were but reminded me that though we must always seek truth sometimes we may have to learn to accept that we might not like the truth we find. If I knew that already, and I think we all do, then Rosenbaum's Rescue underlined it to me in the most exquisite way imaginable. All that on a Thursday night in Finsbury Park.
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