The Land of the Living

Since leaving the Young Vic in 2018, David Lan’s canvas may have changed but his principles certainly haven’t. Over 18 years in charge of the inflential Waterloo theatre he programmed bold work founded on unswerving morals, often foregrounding the lives of less fortunate people around the world. In 2021, in his first big project as a free agent, he oversaw the global tour of a huge puppet called Little Amal to highlight the plight of displaced children. And it’s a deep well of empathy that continues here with his first new play in almost 30 years.

Set in the immediate fallout of the Second World War, with Germany ‘an open wound’, a worker for an agency called United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration stumbles across a mystery when she and her colleagues are trying to rehome displaced children. There are too many adopted kids in one small town.

The reason is the unconscionable Lebensborn programme, Himmler’s invention, which sought to boost the Aryan race by kidnapping ‘perfect’ children from countries including Poland and Ukraine and giving them to Nazi families. Hundreds of thousands of them.

Lan constructs a deeply researched, morally complex play based on interviews with journalist Gitta Serreny, who was part of the effort to reunite those children. It focuses on Juliet Stevenson’s idealistic UNRRA worker Ruth and a boy called Thomas who seeks her out many years later to demand answers about his past. Now a worn journalist, Ruth comes clean, summoning the past around her on the huge traverse stage while Tom Wlaschiha’s Thomas watches on.

It looks amazing: the Dorfman becomes more set than not with Miriam Buether’s vast map floor cutting through it, while a kitchen at one end and a library at the other help create the many locations and eras the play takes us to. Trapdoors open, the front rows sit on mismatched chairs, and a whole forest looms above the stage.

Director Stephen Daldry (The Crown, Billy Elliot) does what he does best, careening between scenes of commotion – in which huge ensembles of actors busily populate the stage – and moments where there’s intimacy and stillness. The busy chunks are great: rifle shootouts, a train conjured from benches. The best moments come when traumatised young Thomas (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt on press night) rages around the stage, whacking plates onto the floor, smashing a chair into pieces, kicking out a window pane. But there are strangely lumpen scenes too which make the play feel its almost three-hour length.

Even though it’s a big ensemble at 15, it’s surprising at the curtain call that there aren’t more actors; the whole thing always feels so full, with lots of people playing lots of people, in various costumes, accents and languages. There are particularly good performances from Kate Duchene as the loveable, flappable Salvation Army helper Dora and Caroline Loncq as variously a stern mother, an officious officer and a haughty chatelaine. Stevenson is as reliable as ever, somehow managing to age up and down 20 years with just a shift in voice and gait.

But what has a real impact is what’s not there: the children. They’re heard but not seen, with surround sound speakers (stunning sound design from Gareth Fry) playing their laughter and chatter so that it feels like there must be hordes of them nearby. They’re present and absent at the same time, victims of the ideological oneupmanship between Nazis, Soviets, Americans.

What Lan puzzles out so carefully is the human need to do any tiny thing you can in the face of awfulness – like taking in a child – and the reverberating consequences those actions can have. Although a deeply human play, and one so carefully written, with an occasional poeticism that lifts this away from simply being Hollywood fodder (though this would definitely make a great film), there is also a stiffness that stifles the emotion. It’s a blast of theatricality and a triumph of intellect which has obvious lessons for our times, even if they sometimes drown out the heart.