The distinguished South African–born British playwright David Lan is a unique theatrical triple threat. He began life as an anthropologist but turned to the stage to demonstrate how clashing historical and spiritual forces shape collective identity.
In Sergeant Ola and His Followers, for instance, a Black colonial Rhodesian enforcer during the 1970s war of liberation comes up against a rural village’s magical ancestral belief in cargo cults; in The End of the Earth, set in the Canadian Northwest at the end of the 19th century, capitalist colonial forces disrupt the Native American potlatch where wealth is ritually re-distributed.
Lan himself transformed his identity in 2000 when he became artistic director of the Young Vic, where he had a superb 18-year run which earned him a C.B.E. for his considerable contribution to British theater. In 2021, to raise refugee awareness and to dramatize the trauma of displacement, Lan conceived a spectacular cross-cultural piece of street theater. He commissioned the Hand Spring Puppet Company, who designed the life-size horse puppet in War Horse, to make Little Amal, a 12-foot-tall Syrian-refugee child, whose tour around the world (17 countries, 166 towns) has generated more than 450 global events, viewed by around two million people on the street and tens of millions online.
The Land of the Living (now playing at the National Theatre in London until November 1) marks Lan’s return both to playwriting and to his themes of displacement and belonging. Told in short, impressionistic cinematic scenes, Lan’s mosaic of memory takes the audience back to 1945, just after the end of World War II, when untold thousands of traumatized children were scattered like flotsam on a sea of devastation: no home, no family, and no country to call their own.
The psychological plight of these abandoned children—stolen, orphaned, dispossessed—speaks directly to the devastation we now are witnessing in Gaza, the Sudan, Ukraine, even in our own backyard.
Here, the indigestible, deracinating landscape is recounted in the reunion of Ruth (Juliet Stevenson), an employee of UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), now a successful 60-something author living in London, with Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha), one of the grown survivors of her ardent herculean ministrations who has since become a concert pianist.
Ruth was 20 when she first laid eyes on Thomas, a 10-year-old Pole, who had been a victim of a Nazi scheme to kidnap Aryan-looking children and give them to childless German families. Ruth refuses to send Young Thomas back to his Polish homeland as part of UNRRA’s postwar repatriation scheme; instead, true to her notion of identity, she returns him to the certainty of his known world: his “adoptive” peasant Bavarian family. Now they face each other as two haunted adults, embodiments each in different ways of the caprice of history, toggling between the past and the present, totems of both regret and resilience.
The Land of the Living takes place with the audience seated on either side of an oblong stage about the size of a bowling lane. At one far end is a kitchen counter; at the other is a large, well-organized library with a piano tucked neatly beneath the books. Below the stage, filing cabinets—a paper trail of barbarity as it turns out—line the perimeter as if suspending a gargantuan tabletop. Taken together as a piece of stage sculpture, Miriam Buether’s minimalist juxtapositions add their own suggestive surreal immanence to Lan’s fever dream of loss, a broken world turned upside down.
Much of Lan’s smart dialogue is exposition, so the dramatic challenge for the makers is momentum. In the cross-cutting of timelines, as the audience works to connect the narrative dots of past to present, the tale inevitably risks losing propulsion. When skating on thin ice, one’s safety is in speed. Buether’s runway gives director Stephen Daldry a good opportunity to show off his scenic legerdemain and to pick up the tempo of his well-drilled cast. Daldry is slick. He manages with terrific brio the entrances and exits of the chaotic peacetime hurly-burly—uncooperative foreign troops, bickering UNNRA staff, distressed parents, unruly abandoned children.
As Ruth—the dramatic simulacrum of Gitta Sereny, the Austrian-British investigative journalist and historian whom Lan befriended and to whom the play is dedicated—Stevenson brings her own sparky sharpness of mind and her moral sinew. Fervent and forthright, she has backbone. Her natural rigor dexterously fills out the lineaments of Ruth’s youthful zeal as well as her adult scruple about her decision over the destiny of Young Thomas (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt).
“Our responsibility was to get [the children] home, to their own families, if they’d survived, or at the very least, to their own soil, their own rivers, their own mountains,” she tells the older Thomas, who has spent a lifetime feeling at once seduced and abandoned by her and their brief wartime bond. “All those years I’ve longed for you,” he tells Ruth, who herself has lived with the guilt of returning him to his adoptive Bavarian peasant family, where for a decade he felt trapped and unhappy. “Why didn’t you keep me?” he asks.
In the crazy paving of the plot, as Ruth tries to wrangle the refugee children to their original homes, Thomas’s youthful identity and her affection for him slowly come into focus. Ruth seems intuitively to see Thomas as a kind of son, an heir to some essential creative destiny which she feels in herself, “a sort of nugget” which “can’t be broken up or melted down, it must be handed on.” For his part, Young Thomas claims Ruth as “my mother” when challenged by Soviet field-workers also rounding up refugee children.
Young Thomas is the emotional linchpin, at once the center of the reclamation saga and the figment of both adults’ mourning. The floppy-haired Wilkinson-Hunt brings a poised, uncanny charisma to Young Thomas’s spooked soul and needs no exposition to explain his wariness. Breaking plates, bolting under beds, careening around rooms, he is a dervish of desperation, exuding an alertness which makes his braced masquerade of identity at once riveting and transparent.
At the play’s end, Ruth and Thomas, who first meet with a cavernous space between them, now sit together on the piano stool. Thomas plays what the audience recognizes as his adoptive mother’s ancient lullaby. The sound is full of lament and longing; it gives The Land of the Living a bittersweet resolution which holds in its eloquent lyricism a sense of their loss and their luck.
Although some of Lan’s narrative cards are dealt out with questionable finesse, the play’s stimulating achievement is to imagine the other. The Land of the Living doesn’t hound an audience with facts; instead, it haunts it with wonder at both the survivors’ woe and their resilience.
John Lahr is a Columnist at AIR MAIL and the first critic to win a Tony Award, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty
