the JC.com Review

By John Nathan

Recently staged Holocaust plays have attempted to tackle the world’s most incomprehensible subject from unconventional angles. But “I Can Cry,” by Israeli-born New Yorker Miri Ben-Shalom, goes back to basics and focuses on the mass murder of Jews.

Ben-Shalom has adapted the journals of Holocaust survivor Ester Herschberg. The rare achievement of this one-act, three-hander, is in providing a sense of relentless persecution. This is not just a tale of survival, but of barely imaginable endurance.

Central to Andy McQuade’s assured production is a performance of power and commitment by Emma Paterson who plays the fresh-faced teenage Herschberg opposite Erene Kaptani’s croaky elderly version. There’s strong “though strangely accented” support from Marcel Stoetzler as the rabid Nazi survived by Hershberg.

Accompanied by video projections, Paterson plays out a real-life nightmare that begins with Ester’s happy childhood in Cracow and ends seven years later, via Auschwitz, Belsen, death marches and cattle-truck train journeys, as an emaciated 20-year-old in Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp where Ester was liberated by the Americans.

The play, which could have been titled “I Will Live” the mantra repeated by Herschberg as she nears both death and liberation - deserves to make an impact when it is staged at the Edinburgh Festival next month.