In this compassionate
play Katrina Wood tells the story of a young girl in 1980’s
London, living with her grandfather whose memories wrack
his sleep and often daylight hours. Years in a WW2 Japanese death camp have broken his spirit and left him
with a bitterly caustic wit. This is based on the author’s own memories of her father, who spent years in the Japanese Changi death camp in Singapore. There
prisoners were forced to build the Kwai bridge, and the Burma railroad,
leaving thousands dead of brutality, work and starvation.
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| Percy Herbert |
Katrina Wood’s father was well-known British actor Percy Herbert who, after the war, became a familiar face in over 70 movies. Besides
appearing in the Oscar winning film The Bridge over the River Kwai, he also served
as adviser on that film.
I
left the theatre in tears, my journalistic
distance wrecked by Wood's showing how past pain distorts a
person’s spirit and any present judgment is unfair. Bad temper might really be
the still open wounds of past injury. To abandon the damaged soul is perhaps
the cruelest thing we all do, thinking that to save ourselves is more important
than holding them close.
The play also hit home because my mother was
abandoned by my father in London during WW2 leaving her destitute with four
young children during the Blitz. All my life she was depressed and bitter, even
suicidal, and I never understood her pain. After she brought us to America I
stayed in New York and she moved to California. It was a relief to be free of
her erratic moods.
I
thought of John McCain who spent seven years in such a hell, tortured and
demeaned, who was offered an early release but chose not to abandon his men. He lived to become an important political powerhouse but even he never
lived beyond today’s mockery and cruelty.
This
honest play lays open the question of how can we ever repay those who lost
everything? I left with
sorrowful thoughts of veterans living on the streets, devastated by forces they
could not overcome and now just damaged goods in an ungrateful world. Great
theater reminds us of our humanity and I dare anyone to leave this play unmoved
as they walk back away into their comfortable safe life that cost others so
much.
Some years ago I stood on Fifth Avenue watching the sparsely attended Veteran’s Day march. It was a Tuesday and not a legal holiday and the New York workers darted among the marching, often wheelchair riding vets, to get across the street. I was wearing a sparkling Stars and Stripes cap and weeping at the negligence shown to these proud but damaged veterans. A team from the TV news stopped and interviewed me to ask why I was crying. I said something like, “these people marching gave up everything so these passersby could have normal and productive lives, and here they are being ignored and it breaks my heart!” I got calls that night from friends who saw me on the NBC Nightly News!
Over
the years live theatre has become infected by cynicism, with plays that mock
the afflicted and desensitize us to real pain. The lost and damaged are now
figures of fun. To name just two plays I walked out on – The Beauty Queen of Lenane and August:
Osage County – because I could not bear their cruel depiction of parental
relationships. Mockery allows us to be cruel and a figure of fun is easy to
abandon. And as for Book of Mormon,
its depiction of Africans, and the roars of laughter at their stupidity and venality, had me leaving at intermission. You can read my published comments further down
on this blog.
