Review: Dr Korczak’s Example

David Greig’s compact 75-minute play tells the story of Janusz Korczak, the Jewish paediatrician who founded a Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and eventually chose to die with his charges at Treblinka. It was well received at Manchester’s Royal Exchange last year — deservedly so.

The play falls into that genre of drama that has become a niche within a niche — not just a Holocaust play, but a Holocaust play for young audiences.

The objective, achieved so well recently at Hampstead’s New End Theatre by Simon Reade’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s The Mozart Question, is to depict the nightmare without causing young audiences to lose their sleep.

Yet I usually leave these works, carefully constructed to inform but not disturb, with nagging doubts as to whether some lost sleep is not a price worth paying even when performing to pre-teens.

Amy Leach’s production of Dr Korczak’s Example comes with a suggested audience age of nine and upwards, although the guidance is more about the show’s family-friendly tone than a warning of any harrowing content.

Before slipping into the role of Korczak, actor Philip Rham tells his audience that what they are about to see actually happened. This statement is then qualified with the introduction of the two fictional central child characters in Greig’s play — Stephanie (Amaka Okafor), Korczak’s little helper; and Adzio (Craig Vye), a wild, starving urchin who Korczak saves from summary execution for stealing food.

Inside the orphanage, the boy is introduced to the civilising influences of Korczak’s example. The orphanage’s community of children runs its own council and court, which rules over disputes between the youngsters. It is an oasis of civilised behaviour, while outside the orphanage’s walls, in the Ghetto and beyond, the adult world is busy tearing down civilization.

It is the kindly Korczak’s prediction that in 50 years’ time, all orphanages will have their own court, where children are judged by their peers. In a sense, he was right, for it was his writings and attitudes towards children that inspired the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a code that has been ratified by every country in the world except two — Somalia (not so surprising for a country responsible for the world’s most recent genocide), and the United States, whose conservative lobby apparently sees something sinister in protecting children.

Far less accurate was Korczak’s prediction that the Nazis would never kill the children in his charge. It turns out that the streetwise Adzio, who says that Korczak’s example of a civilised society will count for nothing when the train to Treblinka departs, was right all along.

When that moment comes, and Korczak, having refused the chance to escape, instead leads his (unseen) charges into the steam of the train — or is that the smoke of the crematorium? — a good few members of the mostly teenage audience were dabbing away tears. And I, too, was moved. After all, this is, at a very basic level, what you want from a Holocaust play.

Miriam Nabarro’s design consists of shelves stacked with suitcases at one end of the Arcola’s converted warehouse, and barn-sized wooden doors at the other. It evokes the spartan cosiness of the orphanage’s wooded interior, though nothing of the Ghetto that surrounds it.

Okafor and Vye give the cello-playing Rham solid support as the children, even if, when they play Nazis in outsized overcoats, Dr Korczak’s Example smacks more of child’s play than a play about children.

And still, that nagging doubt persists. It has something to do with the sense that Holocaust dramas are increasingly succumbing to storytelling conventions that demand a sense of redemption and hope. In the middle of this one there is even a made-up love story. And very touching it is too.

Having learned to kiss, Stephanie and Adzio temporarily escape the clutches of the Nazis, allowing us the hope that somehow they will realise their ambition of smuggling themselves out of the Ghetto, into Russia and onto a boat bound for America.

They don’t, though. First they hide, then they get caught, at which point Stephanie takes a leaf out of Adzio’s book and comes out of her hiding place fighting and wielding a knife. Yet despite the Butch Cassidy ending, Greig is careful to avoid an overly sentimental climax.

I do not want to have a go at well-meaning, well-produced educational plays about the Holocaust, of which Dr Korczak’s Example is undoubtedly one. But unless you are Steven Spielberg (and even Schindler’s List has been accused of sentimentality), basing a work on actual testimony is the only way to avoid the pitfalls of dramatising genocide.

In the name of never forgetting, the Holocaust increasingly comes in neatly packaged, part-fictionalised forms, with a beginning, a middle and an end; with narrative arcs; with characters who fall in love and learn lessons; and with the ingredients that every good storyteller knows is essential to make a good story — a sense of hope and redemption, both of which, as almost everyone who has been touched by the Holocaust knows, did not exist.

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