'The Traveller': René Groothof and Leny Breederveld sublimely show how the world can turn into a prison.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. Remember that name. A writer who left us only two books, and whose life history reads like a twentieth-century horror novel. He wrote, in 1939, three years before his death by a torpedo in the Indian Ocean, 'The Man Who Took Trains', under his English pseudonym John Grane. This book, first published in the original German version in 2018 as Der Reisende, is now making its Dutch stage debut as De Reiziger, in a small but brilliant and painfully poignant adaptation by Helmert Woudenberg.

René Groothof plays the traveller, Otto Silbermann, a Jewish businessman who, after Kristallnacht, has to flee from the death squads that are hunting Jews all over Germany at the time. An amiable man who just cannot manage to understand how the world suddenly turns against him, and who imagines himself protected by his capital and his decency, both of which he carries with him in ever smaller quantities, on ever more trains to ever less pleasant destinations.

All other roles, many dozens it seems, are given cool but extraordinarily apt performances in the hands of Leny Breederveld. Breederveld, like Groothof deeply rooted in mime, I have come to know in recent decades mainly grandly and passively aggressively silent. Now she speaks more than ever and she does so excellently.

Role changes

Breederveld and Groothof, directed by Aike Dirkzwager, set the play in an empty, warehouse-like space as a light narrative performance. In the beginning, Breederveld's role reversals and Groothof's stage views still come across as a little too explanatory. Soon the story wins and, thanks to their wonderful acting, you see how the Jew Silbermann becomes increasingly lonely in a world populated by lots of free Breedervelds. People who sympathise with him, or wish him dead, but all free, while Silbermann's life turns into a prison.

Author Boschwitz wrote this story at a time when he himself was a 'traveller': he had fled Germany in 1935, while all the countries he ended up in after that preferred to lose his kind rather than rich. UI finally ended up in Australia, and when he had to leave there too, the ship on which he was a passenger was hit by a torpedo.

Boschwitz could not have officially known about the horrors of Auschwitz in 1939, but the world he describes shows painfully clearly how horribly our civilised world treated Jews even then. Even in the so-called free West.

You should be able to see this play in a double bill with 'How I got talent for life', the performance based on the book by Rodaan Al Galidi, to see the parallels with the way we now demarcate our world for people who come asking for help.

Unfortunately, the play can only be seen for a short time, like everything else that is coming at us now, after two years of coronapause, in a plethora of premieres.

So hurry.

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Enquiries and booking: Bear Musical Theatre.