Ghosts of Nazi Germany rise to the fore
A visit to Berlin inspired Joanna Murray-Smith to write a new play – her first with a Jewish theme in more than three decaIdes.
In 2015, Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith spent several months holidaying with her family in Berlin and was struck by the level of Holocaust remembrance in the German capital.
“We were astonished at Berlin being a city that was so vibrant and cultivated, and at the same time had a relentless reminder of the war,” she told The AJN.
While riding the U-Bahn, the city’s underground rail system, she thought about how people reconciled the history of the past with their everyday lives, and the idea for her new play was sown.
“Every day we went to Jewish museums and memorials and other testimonials to history, and I became immersed in the thought of what it would be like to be a German and be aware of the fact that the Holocaust was only a lifetime ago.”
In 2017 Murray-Smith returned to Germany to spend more time in Berlin and develop her story about a Jewish Australian tourist who meets a local woman at a bar.
“I wondered what it would be like for two young people who fall in love from opposite sides of the historical agenda – in this case a German girl and a Jewish foreigner – who still have to wrestle with the ghosts of the past,” she explained.
The result is Berlin, a play with only two actors that premiered in Melbourne after a 12-month delay due to the Melbourne Theatre Company’s COVID-19 shutdown.
Actor Michael Wahr played Tom, an Australian travelling through Europe, and Grace Cummings was Charlotte, a Berlin local.
After striking up a friendship in a Berlin bar, she invites him to spend the night at her apartment, but their relationship hits rocky ground as they probe their family histories.
Murray-Smith is hopeful that Berlin will be staged in Sydney in the future, but the play has already been sold to be staged in Britain and Germany once theatres reopen.
Murray-Smith has been writing plays for the past three decades which have been staged around Australia and overseas, including Broadway and the West End. She has also written novels, TV and film scripts and librettos.
One of the first plays that Murray-Smith wrote at university in the early 1990s was Atlanta, set around a young Jewish woman haunted by stories of World War II.
Her father, Stephen Murray-Smith, was a writer and historian who lectured at Melbourne University and founded the literary magazine Overland. He died in 1988.
Her mother, Nita Bluthal, left Poland in 1938 aged 11 with her Jewish parents Israel and Rachel, and the family settled in St Kilda and then Carlton. She met Stephen while at Melbourne University. She died in 2013.
“Not since my early 20s have I tackled a specifically Jewish play or theme,” said Murray-Smith, adding that writing about the Holocaust was not something to be undertaken lightly.
“When you are dealing with an area that is very emotionally powerful, you have to exercise an acute sense of taste. If you are writing about the Holocaust in any shape or form, there is a kind of protocol that you have to observe by osmosis. You pick up that you don’t plunder people’s personal stories and you don’t tread on ghosts and you show a real respect to people’s suffering.”
Murray-Smith said that when writing a play around a major historical theme, she chose an intimate setting over a macro approach.
“I have tried to tell a tiny story well and hope that on some level it symbolically speaks to the big story.”