Canned Goods @ Southwark Playhouse, Borough - Review
A haunting argument that everything is theatre. ★★★★
At Southwark Playhouse, Borough, until 8th February 2025.
Tickets from £16.
Rating: ★★★★
Canned Goods is the fictionalised story of a real Nazi operation, Grossmutter gestorben (Grandmother Died), where an attack on a German radio station by the Polish army was faked. Several people were killed to add realism to the attack, mostly Dachau prisoners and one named man, a farmer named Franciszek Honiok.
Honiok (Tom Wells) is the main protagonist. The story starts with the start of his imprisonment, and he’s the most sympathetic of our trio of prisoners. He was a real person, though one not much is known about, and the writer (Erik Khan) has written him as a morally impeccable character: a Catholic who immediately bonds with his Jewish fellow prisoner; concerned throughout for the wellbeing of his animals - there’s even a touching scene where he questions why we eat pigs, them being such intelligent animals. In the little time we have and with so much going on, making him so perfect is a sound choice but this play will grate if you’re someone who dislikes that kind of black-and-white goodie-baddie dynamic.
His fellow prisoners are Dachau residents Birnbaum (Charlie Archer) and Kruger (Rowan Polonski). Both are stereotypes, and I still can’t decide if it works. Birnbaum is a Jewish university professor, sarcastic and pessimistic, riling up guards and his cellmate but cowering when a fist is raised. Kruger is a criminal, a thief, economically downtrodden and antisemitic with angry anecdotes about local rich Jews, and the subject of most of the laughs in the play. On one hand, I understand that they’re meant to stand in for more than just themselves, being invented people representing desecrated dead. On the other, they’re predictable, with so much dialogue and character focus, I would have liked more interest. Birnbaum is intellectual in an identical way to Honiok, and pessimistic in a play that already gives a hearty sense of doom - while charming, sympathetic and often funny, he doesn’t add much to the dynamic. Kruger is a hypocritical antisemite, representative of the many Germans who let their hate pull them into a hell of their own, but he is neither the main antagonist nor given a chance to show his humanity. He would be more interesting, and more tragic, if he was allowed to be a bit more complex. More investigation of that very contemporary theme of economic anxiety expressed as hatred of out-groups could also be interesting.
The antagonist, on behalf of the German state, the Nazis, the SS et. al, is Naujocks, another stereotype. This time it’s Camp Nazi. However, it works well - he’s the guard, a major, orchestrating this false flag operation, but within the play he’s also a kind of showrunner. He directly addresses the audience frequently, framing the Grandmother Dies as a form of theatre. It could be a poor role with a worse actor, but Dan Parr carries it off flawlessly, naturalistic and playfully evil. With the exception of some supervillain fake laughs, it feels genuinely threatening, especially in moments of intense audience participation towards the end.
The audience participation is a small part of the genius of this play - it is absolutely successful at making the audience feel complicit in the horrors contained within. We are a dual audience- to Canned Goods, of course, but also to Grandmother Died. We know why the men are there from the start, while they wax futility about what it could be (preparations for the firing squad? the start of their hero’s journey?); we can see through walls the prisoners can’t; we listen and applaud the Naujocks’ wonderful show. This carries on to the very end, even leaving the theatre sent a twist of guilt through my gut.
As is more often than not the case at the Playhouse, the staging and costuming (Mona Camille) are naturalistic and do the job well, with impressive modularity and consideration of the level central stage, but nothing is outstandingly beautiful.
Canned Goods is an unnerving and well executed, if simplistic at times, imagining of the day before the war that shaped the 20th century. It is sharply modern and sensitive to the lives lost, and complemented by a roundly competent cast.
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