Pascal Theatre Company today announces the semi-staged reading of Julia Pascal’s play, As Happy As God In France, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2023.
The event will take place at Burgh House in Hampstead on 26 January, followed by a Q&A with the cast and Pascal herself.
As Happy As God In France reveals an unknown women’s war history; a meeting between Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon, and Eva Daube in the French camp of Gurs in 1940.
The play explores identity, morality and what it means to be a German Jewish stateless exile in the Holocaust’s French antechamber, and will feature music by Flick Isaac-Chilton.
The cast for this staged reading includes Giselle Wolf (Hannah Arendt), Caroline Wildi (Charlotte Salomon), Laura Wohlwend (Eva Daube), Leah Gayer (Trude Gottlieb) and Fiz Marcus (Agathe Blumenfeld).
Holocaust Memorial Day is held on 27 January each year, the date which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.
This event is supported by The Cockayne Foundation through the London Community Fund.
Julia Pascal says: “When I discovered that a cousin’s aunt had been held in Gurs, and that she had been incarcerated with Hannah Arendt, I felt it imperative to dramatise this hidden history. This play honours those whose lives were stolen from them for the crime of being born a Jew.”
