Gabriel
Written by Moira Buffini
Directed by Kevin Jackson
With Elaine Hudson, Lee Lewis, Elisha Oliver, Pete Nettell and Wendy Strehlow
New Theatre, Sydney
Until September 14
REVIEW BY IGGY KIM
Gabriel is a wonderfully acted and intensely thought-provoking play about truth, history and self-preservation.
The setting is a farmhouse on the English Channel island of Guernsey, to which Jeanne Becquet (played by Elaine Hudson) and her family have been driven after Nazi officers seized her ancestral home. Jeanne is a pragmatist who keeps the Nazis on side for the sake of her daughter and daughter-in-law. Indeed, her collaboration knows no limit when it comes to protecting her family.
But this is all upset when the daughter-in-law, Lily (Lee Lewis), finds a naked man washed up on the beach. The unconscious man is hidden and nursed back to health by the women; when he awakes, they discover he has lost his memory.
It is soon revealed that he speaks both English and German fluently. No-one is sure who he is. The imaginative teenage daughter, Estelle (Elisha Oliver), names him Gabriel, in the hope that he is an avenging angel come to save them.
But Jeanne is terrified, convinced he is a Nazi SS officer who went missing in a shipwreck off the coast. Lily thinks he is a downed British fighter pilot. Mrs Lake, the housekeeper (Wendy Strehlow), thinks he is a local bank clerk who, suffering from a brain tumour, attempted suicide.
Whoever he is, Gabriel is the catalyst for bringing to the surface the extraordinary tensions wrought by the Nazi occupation. Confronted by a handsome man without an identity, Lily voices her regret at having married into a life of rural drudgery.
The Nazi commanding officer, Major Von Pfunz (Pete Nettell), elicits Lily's Jewish identity out of Jeanne who is ambivalent towards Lily but eventually tries to protect her.
Von Pfunz is a well-educated, cultured German officer with complex contradictions. He aspires to truth and civil behaviour. The full terror of the Third Reich is emblazoned on his menacing uniform; yet he deals with Estelle's antics like an annoyed parent and Jeanne's hostility with an ingratiating edge.
But when Gabriel translates Von Pfunz's diary, stolen by Estelle, Von Pfunz's macabre poetry about the Nazi death camps comes to light. The climactic ending is triggered by Von Pfunz's insistence that Lily be formally registered as a Jew.
Von Pfunz's character is most interesting. English playwright Moira Buffini has attempted to demystify the Nazi officer: he is not the shrieking monster or automaton so typical of renderings by a bourgeois historiography hell-bent on portraying Nazism as something totally outlandish and alien to the workings of capitalism, rather than a logical outgrowth of imperialism in deep crisis.
Von Pfunz's conversations reveal a complex personification of realpolitik in a time of war, as well as a morose resignation and a philosophical grappling with notions of truth and integrity in his extraordinary situation, which he arrived at through a combination of choice and circumstance. There is pathos as it surfaces that he is in love with the mocking Jeanne Becquet.
The revelations about Von Pfunz's poems are met with disbelief by Jeanne and Mrs Lake. We are taken back to a time before the Holocaust is an established fact. Again, this helps demystify the Nazi period and, indeed, history. For it treats that period as it was viewed at that time, not as an inevitable part of the historical landscape but as a creation of contemporaries, people of the same generation, time and place, with all their complexities.
Gabriel has been superbly written by Moira Buffini and aptly matched in this production by the New Theatre team.
From Green Left Weekly, September 11, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.