Theodor Adorno famously said: “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. Indeed, one might argue how all artistic responses to something as morally complex as the Holocaust can only fall short of properly understanding it. Take for instance Life is Beautiful – a film that has been criticised for softening its scenes in a concentration camp with comedy and oversentimentality – and Charlie Chaplin, who said that he would have never made The Great Dictator if he had known the full extent of the suffering under the Nazis.

What makes Frank Cottrell Boyce’s play God on Trial different from these is how it takes the unimaginable evil of the Holocaust as its starting point, asking the question: how could the god of the Jews let this happen? The trial of God that follows is unflinching in its skepticism of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and in its questioning of the validity of faith in the face of an evil so powerful that it seems to undermine the goodness in humanity, and even the power of free will, when one’s whole race is subject to genocide.

Director of the Homerton Amateur Theatrical Society (HATS), Louise Banable, tells me that the audience, “the most important part of this play”, will be seated on a traverse stage and surrounded by the bunks of prisoners in an Aushwitz blockhouse. In the original television play of 2008, director Andy de Emmony did something similar by bringing the naked and shorn prisoners and a present-day touring party together in a gas chamber. The implication is clear: we all share a common humanity. Indeed, for actor Tom Walter, “the blockhouse represents life itself”, because all of us are “waiting for death”. The staging also allows for greater immersion of the audience into the atmosphere of a place where half the men and women in the room know that they will be dead in the morning.

The challenge for the actors is therefore to convey this sense of place so that the trial of God feels real and the audience can relate to it. Their commitment is impressive: a couple of them have even had their heads shaved. Many of the cast tell me that they feel a strong responsibility to give the best performance they can, and at one point an actor says: “I feel bad making a joke in rehearsal”.

While there is a necessary weight of seriousness attached to any fictional reenactment of Auschwitz, this does not stop Banable from taking a fluid approach to the text. During the rehearsal I watched, there were often breaks to discuss the staging and performance of a scene, the actors considering both the arguments of each character and what it would have been like to be a prisoner, and even criticising the closing lines of Boyce’s script; whether or not they choose to change them will be revealed on the opening night.

Despite this discursive, interpretative approach, a trial must still have a verdict: does Boyce’s play in the end offer definite answer to the problem of evil? Banable says that “different viewpoints are well represented” in the play, and actor Aziza Benali argues that the trial demonstrates that “faith itself serves a purpose”; it is “a play within a play” in which the prisoners can come to terms with their faith and identity and receive comfort when they need it the most.

If HATS can pull this off, they will prove that portraying the Holocaust in art is far from “barbaric”. At the very least, Banable and the cast have convinced me that these debates are not only valid, but vital for all of us. 

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