Born Lucy Schwob, Claude Cahun is known as a radical surrealist and experimentalist of gender identity and norms, and a resistor of Nazi ideology on the island of Jersey during the war, together with their lifelong lover and stepsister Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) — a real-life Tipping the Velvet meets The Night Watch.
D.R. Hill’s Who is Claude Cahun, produced by The Exchange Theatre, centres on Cahun’s life story by sketching three excerpts: the couple’s secret anti-Nazi resistance on Jersey; Cahun’s childhood as Lucy Schwob, growing up with a mother holding homophobic views and a fictionally “progressive” father who believes the world is not yet ready for their child; and their surrealist years in Paris, where male artists continued to objectify Cahun as a desirable female figure.
These excerpts from Cahun’s life are beautifully interwoven by Juliette Demoulin’s symbolist design, featuring a wooden wardrobe on stage right, and a backdrop wall with doorways where Jeffrey Choy’s projections provide historical backgrounds. In one scene, the male surrealists completely ignore the real, living Cahun, but instead express their longing to a naked half-body window dummy.
David Furlong’s direction builds up a promising narrative framework with great potential, as the Nazi aesthetics maintained a deeply rooted, paradoxically sophisticated relationship with homosexuality. Under such context, Claude Cahun can be a pinpoint site for richer and more nuanced investigation. How did the Nazi regime not only persecute, but also regulate and discipline gay people since Kristallnacht? How did queer people navigate and positively construct themselves through resistance? How did the regime grapple with its own latent homoeroticism, intertextualised and mirrored with that of Cahun?
This is structurally hinted at in the subplot of the German officer’s search for the resistant — the soldier without a name, Cahun’s ultimate self-identification. In the blinded mind of the officers and Nazi epistemology, soldiers are masculine so they cannot be female. Thus, they firmly assume the mastermind of resistance must come from within German soldiers, unable to comprehend the subversion taking place right in front of them by the queer couple pretending to be sisters.
However, much of the play feels stripped of historical context. With too much telling and too little showing, it gears toward a clichéd and repetitive manifesto for the liberation of gender identity, rather than a textured portrayal of a historically contingent figure. When Cahun declares, “This is my identity. You cannot take it from me,” in the jail, the line lands as overly contemporary. Similarly, the love between Cahun and Moore feels oddly abstracted, full of declaration, lacking either human details or convincing, touching intimacy.
Vignettes of contemporary dance are interwoven into the narrative, but these too feel ornamental. They do little to embody the performers’ physicality or their relational dynamics, and seem instead like devised theatre exercises left underdeveloped.
Rivkah Bunker portrays an androgynous Cahun and Amelia Armande is the gentle yet unyielding Moore. Gethin Alderman steals the show in multiple roles, especially as the “idealist” German officer, whose belief in Nazi ideology gives his life meaning — an Eichmann-like figure through the eyes of Hannah Arendt. Ben Bela Böhm’s compassionate German captain eventually showcases some sophistication, and Sharon Drain’s shopkeeper on Jersey quietly indicates normal people’s banality of evil.
Is our era the era for Claude Cahun? While the answer could be positive, we must also ask: have we ended our war against fascism, “not only historical fascism, but the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us”? We all shall not yet rest.
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