‘People boil in oil while blocks of ice stand watching’.

I am not a theatre critic. When I go to watch a play, I like to totally lose myself in the story and not concern myself with the actors’ abilities. If they are actors worth their merit, then that is how it should be. Usually, I am not disappointed, although there was one memorable-for-all-the-wrong-reasons performance at Whitby Pavilion last year, featuring some very well known luvvies, that wasn’t worth the inflated price of the programme, let alone that of the seat. Those keepers of Gertrude’s abysmal secret could have learned a great deal from both the cast and production crew of ‘Hypothermia’, performed at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough. This is the third production by Full Body and The Voice Theatre Company that I have had the utmost pleasure to see.    

   The play, which is performed in-the-round, giving it a very intimate feel (and going right to the heart of SJT’s roots) was written by Vanessa Brooks, whose many credits include, ‘Poor Mrs Pepys’, ‘Penny Blue’ and ‘All At Sea’. It centres around a psychiatric hospital of 1940′s Germany and is an incisive examination of the Nazi eugenics policies. Brooks also directed ‘Hypothermia’.

    Ben Langford, who is quickly becoming established as an ‘actor with clout’, took the central character, Oskar’, a long time resident at the hospital, through his transformative journey from the joking, singing patient to the terror of  facing the holocaust with a skill that drew upon all his physical, verbal and emotional energies. Johnny Vivash was the suitably dark and sinister Dr. Katscher, Faye Billing, the hospital administrator who kept an all-knowing eye on unfolding events, Bradley Cole, the doctor who could not heal the downward spiral of his own life and Margaret Fraser embodied Frau Poppendick, who desperately wants to hang on to her beliefs despite her shattered dreams. All were convincing and emotional performances.

   The icy and snowy conditions outside the theatre seemed somehow appropriate, echoed as they were by the ice-laden motifs running through the production. Kevin Jenkins’  set design, appearing on first sight to be a simple affair with two vomitories, a couple of desks and four chairs, belied the intelligent attention to detail that Jenkins always imbues his work with. Snow surrounded the set, the bird’s footprints representing the runic symbols for life and death. The landscape that unfolded was one ‘where breath freezes on the lips and bodies ache for human kindness’. I won’t spoil the last sequence for anyone hoping to catch up with ‘Hypothermia’ on its tour, suffice to say that Jenkins and lighting designer, Keith Forryan, have put together something that makes the audience leave the theatre, stunned, numbed to the core and amazed, all at the same time.

   Composer and musical director, Laurence Kaye, whose work is familiar to me from ‘In The Footsteps of Mr Butler’ (another Full Body and The Voice production) and ‘The Glass Mountain’ (Trestle Theatre), has produced a score for ‘Hypothermia’, which is mesmerising and impacting. Drawing upon Schubert and Kurt Weil amongst others, he follows through, as he must, the ice sequences that are lynchpin to the sound plot, when characters engage in swimming competitions beneath the ice, rhythmic sections that are truly chilling, but to counterpoint the darkness, Kaye includes a number of sections with dance-like, even comedic, qualities. The whole is a rich, varied banquet for the ears.

    ‘Hypothermia’ deals with dark material. The idea of killing the ‘incurably ill’ – an incredibly broad and sweeping definition covering many diverse conditions – was posed well before 1939. In the 1920’s, debate on this issue centred on a book co-authored by Alfred Hoche, a noted psychiatrist, and Karl Binding, a prominent scholar of criminal law. They argued that economic savings justified the killing of “useless lives”. During the First World War, patients in institutions had ranked low on the list for rationing of food and medical supplies, and as a result, many died from starvation or disease. The war undermined the value attached to individual life and, combined with Germany’s humiliating defeat, led many nationalists to consider ways to regenerate the nation as a whole, at the expense of individual rights. In 1935, Hitler stated privately that ‘in the event of war, [he] would take up the question of euthanasia and enforce it”, because ‘such a problem would be more easily solved’ during wartime. War would provide both a cover for killing and a pretext – after all, hospital beds and medical personnel would be freed up for the war effort. The upheaval of war and the diminished value of human life during wartime would also, Hitler believed, mute expected opposition. Unlike the forced sterilizations, the killing of patients in institutions was carried out in secrecy. The code name was ‘Operation T4’, a reference to Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the Berlin Chancellery offices where the programme was headquartered. Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of ‘T-4’,  organising and carrying out nearly all aspects of the operation, targeting adult residents in all government or church-run sanatoria and nursing homes. These medical experts rarely examined any of the patients. The doomed were transported to killing centres in Germany and Austria which were walled-in fortresses, mostly former psychiatric hospitals, castles, and a former prison — at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. In the beginning, patients were killed by lethal injection, but by 1940, carbon monoxide gas was used as the preferred method of killing, the gas chambers disguised as showers, complete with fake nozzles, in order to deceive victims. Meticulous records, discovered after the war, documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six ‘euthanasia’ centres between January 1940 and August 1941.

In the early 1980’s, I was privileged to be given two artist-in-residencies for brief periods. One was in a psychiatric institution where I heard sad stories of elderly people who had been incarcerated there for many years, not considered fit to interact with society and labelled mentally ill because they had been unable to learn to read, had had the misfortune to get pregnant outside of wedlock, or, had epilepsy. They spent their days counting brass nails into plastic bags and packing plastic dolls into cardboard boxes. A sweet, generous, ninety-two year old lady,  who been there since she was fourteen, told me, with great articulacy,  that she had endured years of incestuous abuse by her older brother. She was due to start work as a live-in girl  and, before she left home, decided to tell her mother what had been happening to hopefully prevent her younger siblings from suffering. Her mother disbelieved her and had her committed for her lies. That confession robbed her of her life. My time amongst these people was just before the advent of reintegration into the community…and what a hoo-ha that caused amongst the more narrow-minded in our world. These people, gentle and creative beings that they were, would all have been destroyed had they been resident in Hitler’s Germany. My other residency was in a ‘Rubella unit’, where the clients had learning disabilities, blindness and deafness, brought about because their mothers, almost certainly unwittingly, had come into contact with German measles whilst they carried their precious babies. Had these people lived in Hitler’s Germany, they, too, would have had their lives curtailed.

A friend of mine, Sally Johnson, died in 2000, at the age of 25. The daughter of acclaimed artist, Ken Johnson, Sally became an accomplished water-colourist, selling more paintings than Van Gogh. I have one of her pictures on my study wall. There is also one of her paintings on a wall of No. 10 Downing Street – when John Major was prime minister he said it “expressed the peace and tranquillity missing from my busy life”. Sally’s amazing life-story was written down in the book, ‘Face Like A Flower’, by her biographer, Bill Anderson. Had Sally have had the misfortune to be born into Hitler’s Germany, we would not have ever got to hear about, or see, her astounding gifts. Sally wouldn’t have survived the gas chambers, because Sally had Down’s syndrome.

‘Hypothermia’ is a play that doesn’t shy away from asking how far removed  are we now from making judgements about the worth of humanity and whether a reluctance to take action and fight prejudices could result in similar ‘acts of mercy’ happening today, a questioning made all the more poignant by the fact that some of the cast of ‘Hypothermia’ have learning difficulties and, had they have lived in 1940′s Germany, they would not have survived Hitler’s culling. Full Body and The Voice can be so proud of all that they have achieved. Many of their actors, over the years, have gone on to work on equal terms with non-learning disabled actors in a variety of settings, including the soaps, ‘Emmerdale’ and ‘Eastenders’, and have more than proved their worth. Hypothermia’s own cast showed a talent, charisma and energy for acting that was second to none. They are all stars in my book – and that includes James Munton, who did not appear, but who I know was ready to step-in at a moment’s notice. Their performance in this play was magnificent. I sincerely hope that there are awards in the offing for the whole of that production team. It was a triumph for every one of them, for their ground-breaking company, for Vanessa Brooks’ writing and directing skills, for the talented crew, for theatre as an art form and for our society. It takes guts to play a role knowing that, ‘there but for the grace of God…’ and it takes more talent than the famous ‘Gertrude’ has in her secretive, little finger to do it with such style and panache.

Links: Exclusive mix of one of Laurence Kaye’s tracks for ’Hypothermia’ available on soundcloud.com

http://soundcloud.com/lozkaye/procedure-must-be-followed

Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough – http://www.sjt.uk.com/

Full Body And The Voice – http://www.fullbody.org.uk/

‘Face like a flower’, the story of Sally Johnson – http://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=114&category_id=4&vmcchk=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=62