The extraordinary story of how Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman survived the Holocaust in the Warsaw ghetto has been told in his own best-selling memoir and Roman Polanski’s 2002 film, for which Adrien Brody won an Oscar.
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Brody → survive → Oscar
Even though music sits at the heart of Szpilman’s narrative, I was wary of this stage musical, believing the subject and the form to be terminally at odds.
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subject → sit → odds
In fact, director Thom Southerland’s bare-boards adaptation, using Szpilman’s own compositions and deploying an ensemble of actor-musicians around a sombrely black baby grand piano, is a qualified success.
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using → use → piano
The tragedy and triumph of the story comes across clearly, partly because it’s barely been dramatised.
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it → come → story
Instead, Daniel Krikler’s Szpilman delivers the narrative largely as a monologue, into which snapshot confrontations or family flashpoints are woven.
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confrontations → deliver → which
The music consists mostly of breezy, coffee-house love songs which don’t really fit or have any internal coherence: eight lyricists are credited, including Szpilman’s son.
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lyricists → consist → son
But the mere fact we know they were by the man himself elevates the endeavour.
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they → know → endeavour
Two passages of Chopin supply gravitas and eloquence.
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passages → supply → gravitas
In the second half, snatches of an instrumental composition, Life of the Machines, chime with the jarring events and the industrial nature of the Nazi genocide.
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snatches → chime → genocide
Almost all of the actual piano-playing is done by the musical director Malcolm Forbes-Peckham, expressionlessly, in white tie and tails, at the baby grand.
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all → do → grand
Which sounds counter-intuitive, but which actually works, enabling the onstage Szpilman to dissociate from and observe his own life.
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which → sound → life
The piano itself is shoved and pulled around on a platform piled with refugee suitcases and a radio: it does duty as a tank, a ghetto checkpoint, or the structure of the collapsing building where the starving Szpilman holes up.
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Szpilman → shove → building
However, rather too many subordinate characters here suggest that Szpilman must be saved because of his talent – because he is “special”.
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he → suggest → talent
Szpilman, surely, never suggested that one life was worth more than another.
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life → suggest → another
And as every version of his story makes clear, young “Wladek” was part of an exceptional family at an exceptional time.
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Wladek → make → time
His parents and three siblings were talented classical players – his brother Henryk is derided for composing songs that are “catchy” – living high in cosmopolitan, wealthy Warsaw.
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that → deride → Warsaw
This world is suddenly shattered, like the windows of Polish National Radio blown in by bombs while Szpilman is playing, when the Nazis arrive.
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Nazis → shatter → bombs
Yellow stars are issued, and Jews are segregated behind the ghetto wall.
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Jews → issue → wall
“The inviolability of our property and our lives will be secure,” insists Wladek’s father, the first of several moments of overemphatic foreshadowing.
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father → insist → foreshadowing
The horrors told to us here can’t be quite as vivid as they are in the book or the film: the old man lapping up spilled soup from the ground; the child beaten to death by a Nazi on one side of a wall while Szpilman tries to pull him through from the other.
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Szpilman → tell → other
An exception is the moment when his family is taken away.
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family → take → ?
Andrzej Goulding’s slatted set becomes a railway cattle car, from which they stare, their instruments suddenly soundless.
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instruments → become → which
Wladek’s later increasing isolation and emotional and physical etiolation is never as profoundly felt as this.
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isolation → increase → this
The hostility between Wladek and his brother Henryk (Nitai Levi) is overplayed through largely inappropriate songs, and most of the subordinate characters are sketched in.
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most → overplay → characters
But in the central role, Krikler has a fascinating, other-worldly manner, as if he’s experiencing events in real time and in recollection as part of a reverie or fugue state.
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he → have → state
The final number, Out of the Darkness, when he finally presses the ivory keys, expresses both his wonder and his guilt at surviving.
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he → press → wonder
Szpilman died in 2000, aged 88, in Warsaw, a riposte to Hitler.
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Szpilman → die → Hitler
Again, I wondered what a stage adaptation in a 200-seat north London theatre could do that the book and the film hadn’t already done.
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book → wonder → that
But there is something about seeing live humans enact this story of human endurance and playing the music of the man who lived it.
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who → be → it
The Aporia
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