Singer

Thanks to Bent, Life is Beautiful and Schindler’s List,
we all have a good idea what the inside of a concentration camp looked like.
But for Piotr Singer, the titular anti-hero in Peter Flannery‘s epic
chronicle of one Holocaust survivor’s rise and fall in post-war Britain,
Auschwitz is not so much a place as a state of mind.

“Make a deal today and live until tomorrow,” chuckles this wily Polish Jew
as he contrives to make a killing off his fellow death camp inmates. And
it’s this same ruthless survival instinct that powers his subsequent ascent
from penniless refugee to slum landlord in 1950s London.

But the more Singer attempts to erase his past – by changing his first name
to Peter, becoming a British citizen and ultimately faking his own death to
re-emerge as a soup-serving saviour of the homeless – the more it comes back
to haunt him. As his life-long friend Stefan (John Light) remarks, “The
past must be confronted so it will never return.”

There must have been days when Flannery thought Singer
would not
return either. First staged by the RSC with Antony Sher in the lead, it
hasn’t been seen in the capital for 15 years.

Then again, perhaps it was waiting for the right actor. And the good news
for Sean Holmes‘ Oxford Stage Company production is that Ron Cook is the

ideal man to follow in Sher’s footsteps.

There’s a Fagin-esque quality to Singer’s wheeling and dealing that could
easily lead to coarse Semitic caricature. But Cook never goes down that
route, basing his character’s tireless pursuit of his own self-interest in a

recognisably flawed and surprisingly touching humanity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in an electric scene where Singer confronts the

former Ukrainian guard who brutalised him in Auschwitz. Revenge may be a
dish best served cold, Flannery suggests, but it can also leave a nasty
taste in the mouth.

Vividly written “in the Jacobean style”, complete with chorus, soliloquies
and a King Lear-style climax, Singer
audaciously tries to
condense four decades of social history into two-and-a-half hours. It’s a
laudable ambition, even it does lead to some unconvincing passages and a
crude portrait of Thatcherism as just another evil dictatorship imposing its

will on the people.

A young, multi-ethnic cast adopt a variety of roles in Holmes’ fast-moving
revival. Ultimately, though, it’s Cook who dominates, fuelling Flannery’s
slightly schematic piece with pathos, dignity and a dark comic energy.

– Neil Smith