Astoria – Brockley Jack Studio Theatre

Astoria continues at the Jack Studio Theatre, London until 15 April 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Written and directed by Tony Britten, Astoria takes it title from a work written by playwright and poet Jura Soyfer, prior to 1937. Astoria is a mythical state which doesn’t exist, a creation to exploit and manipulate those who believe it might offer a utopian existence. A satire on the Austrian people’s belief that the National Socialist Party and Adolf Hitler might give them a better life. Britten’s programme note is explicit in his belief that Soyfer’s play presages not only the events that immediately followed its performance, but sees echoes of events occurring in Britain, and his fear ‘that a lurch to the right is threatening the safety of the world’.

The Britten Astoria has parallels with Paula Vogel’s Indecent (another play within a play) where the inner piece is a work of fiction, and Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny about a disparate group searching for a mythical city. And we might also include Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt set in Vienna amongst the bourgeoisie.

Whereas the first two works have a larger musical content, Astoria is very much a play with unmemorable songs, delightfully sung by Sam Denia as Jimmy Berg, though with no specific song credits, one cannot tell which are composed by Britten and which by Berg. Translations are attributed to Britten and Horst Jarka, a Soyfer specialist.

I found Astoria, the play within the play, rather hammered home its message, but was gripped by the non-fiction characters. John Lehmann (Taylor Danson) is the English writer and poet who despises his Eton/Cambridge education but is comfortable in his sexuality and has a taste in young working-class men who he pays for sex when not tutoring Soyfer.

Soyfer (Joshua Ginsberg), Russian born and with a family that fled the Bolsheviks, now considers himself a Communist Jew. His girlfriend Helli (Olivia Benjamin), who flees Austria for England, leaves Soyfer to attempt an escape by skiing over the alps to Switzerland, but he is captured and ends his days in Buchenwald where he dies of typhoid.

Martin Miller (Benjamin Chandler), a fellow actor and then the despotic ruler of Astoria, is a terrific music hall turn, part Emcee from Cabaret, part Arturo Ui. The latter play was written in 1941 and one can only wonder if Brecht might have been influenced by Soyfer’s play? Britten gives us a couple of scenes where Lehmann and Soyfer discuss Brecht’s writing. There is also a scene which playfully dissects whether Lehmann and Soyfer can justify denigrating the bourgeoisie when they are clearly leading a bourgeois existence themselves.

The writing is dense and detailed with occasional bursts of humour to alleviate the horror of the forthcoming Nazi brutality, but without the humour of Stoppard or the edge of the musical Cabaret. When we reach the final scene, the simple staging of the actors lined across the stage detailing the events at Dachau and Soyfer’s death at 26 is powerful. We hear how his humour kept fellow prisoners living in hope, and the poem he wrote and was set to music by fellow prisoner Herbert Zipper (‘Dachau-Lied’) is the musical highlight of the play, in a translation by Lehmann.

Britten is the writer and director, and one wonders had there been an outside directorial eye, the first half might have had more clarity and impact. However, Britten’s direction of his actors is expert and the performances are excellent. His ensemble of young actors are surely destined for major productions in the future, and justify this production’s four stars.

Kate Bannister and Karl Swinyard from the Jack Studio must also be commended for supporting this production. In a time when but a handful of plays are playing to capacity houses, we should be overjoyed to find such a gem in a pub theatre in South East London.

Leon Ferguson