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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 178 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Street of Crocodiles
by Theatre de Complicité
The Street of Crocodiles is based on the life and work of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz. Schultz was born in the Polish town of Drohobycz and murdered there by the Nazis 50 years later in 1942.
During the 1930s Schultz became one of Poland’s foremost writers. A number of his short stories have been woven together with his life in this play.
The central theme of his writing, expressed stunningly in the play, is that things are not as they seem, do not remain static and are constantly being transformed.
Set to work by the SS to catalogue books due for destruction, Schultz comes across a book whose smell summons memories of his family and life as a school teacher. Real events and characters are fused with nightmarish images and characters. Objects and people become transformed.
The play succeeds in using inventive techniques to bring the complex psychological narrative of Schultz’s work to the stage. This does, however, mean you have to work hard to decipher the action as it proceeds in Schultz’s mind. The reality of Nazi occupation frames the play at the beginning and at the end with Schultz’s murder.
It is this that gives Schultz’s memories an added edge. The world he depicts of life in a small Polish town changing under the impact of industrialisation is brutally cut short along with the life of an author whose writing explored the mind and imagination.
See the play and if you can, have a look at the programme beforehand.
The Street of Crocodiles is at the Young Vic and goes to Brighton in October
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