There is a particular kind of silence that descends upon a theatre when an audience realises they are being made complicit in an act of looking. At Stratford East, where Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s Here There Are Blueberries is making its chilling London debut following acclaimed US runs, that silence is heavy, clinical, and eventually deafening.
The production begins with a mystery. In 2007, an 80‑page photo album arrived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sent by a retired US Lieutenant Colonel. This is the Höcker Album, a record of Auschwitz containing no images of the dead. Instead, it shows Nazis at leisure: SS officers lounging at a chalet, flirting with the secretarial pool, and eating blueberries. It is a placid, horrifying log of mundane moments between murders.
Philippine Velge is compelling as Rebecca Erbelding, the archivist whose meticulous pursuit of facts provides the play’s spine. Alongside Geraldine Alexander’s authoritative Judy Cohen, the ensemble, including Clifford Samuel, Kirsten Foster, Scott Barrow, Arthur Wilson, Os Leanse, and Paksie Vernon, navigates a detective story that eschews emotional manipulation for a noble, simple staging. Characters often state their thinking plainly, mirroring the clinical brightness of David Lander’s lighting.
In this way, Here There Are Blueberries becomes a theatrical companion piece to Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest. While Glazer used sound to suggest the horror over the garden wall, Kaufman utilises the unique language of the stage to interweave timelines. We see archivists, perpetrators, and their modern‑day descendants sharing one space. It forces us to confront the “banality of evil”, the reality that monstrous acts are often perpetrated by “terrifyingly normal” administrators. As Hannah Arendt observed of Adolf Eichmann, these were individuals whose failure was a radical inability to think from another’s standpoint.
The technical execution is masterful. Derek McLane’s scenic design and David Bengali’s projections blow these snapshots up to a gargantuan scale. When the famous blueberry image appears, the cast supplies the gentle clink of bowls; later, a photograph of officers caught in a rainstorm is restaged. The ensemble laugh fully and openly, the sound rolling into the rafters. It is ordinary laughter, which is precisely what makes it so frightening.
Ultimately, Here There Are Blueberries is less concerned with the past than with the responsibility of looking. We study the faces, searching for a sign that separates “them” from “us.” None appears. The blueberries are real; so is everything just beyond the frame.
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