Review
TITLE: Hypothermia by Full Body and The Voice
VENUE: Lawrence Batley Theatre
BY: Val Javin
IT would be all too easy these days to spend night after night in the theatre simply being entertained, made to laugh, to weep or even, on occasions, to be scared.
What more could anyone ask you might say? But how often are we challenged, made to think about our lives and be reminded what it is that makes us human?
Powerful theatre can do all of that and in a hard-hitting world premiere production by Huddersfield based theatre company Full Body and the Voice, writer and director Vanessa Brooks certainly gets the adrenalin flowing. She pulls few punches either in content or delivery.
Hypothermia opened on the Lawrence Batley Theatre’s main stage in a world premiere production this week and is set to tour. It deserves to be widely seen.
In Hypothermia it is winter. The year is 1940, the setting a hospital for hereditary and incurable diseases. The place is Nazi Germany.
The story unfolds in the round, the audience close up and personal, gathered around the actors as if in silent witness to those who once stood by and watched as human beings were subjected to appalling experiments and finally to genocide as the Nazis pursued their policy of racial purity.
The world recoiled in horror at a regime which used prisoners in all manner of tests including simulating the freezing conditions in which thousands of soldiers died or were debilitated by hypothermia on the Eastern Front.
Who today could stand by and see one person so arbitrarily weigh the value of another? Who could condone such ruthless disregard for human life? Who indeed.
Hypothermia is gripped by ice. It freezes the heart of the strutting SS officer Katscher (Johnny Vivash), a doctor driven by prejudice and ambition and fires that of his colleague, clinic director Dr Erich (Bradley Cole) whose fear is fuelled by alcohol.
Both characters are played with deliberate physicality offering a stark contrast to the serene and seemingly fragile figure of the play’s central character.
Ben Langford who plays Oskar – the patient at the heart of this roulette wheel of life and death – offers a focused and disciplined performance which is utterly compelling.
Ben is a learning disabled actor who has worked with the company for 10 years. There is no mistaking that his is the enduring spirit, the very soul of the play.
There is irony in every word and gesture, every move and every moment shared by a company of five actors whose ensemble work speaks volumes about mutual trust and respect. After all neither were valued in a world where patients were reduced to numbers, lives discarded in the flick of a file.
This is not easy theatre but then neither are the complex and important issues which Hypothermia tackles.
This is a piece which rightly disturbs, may even distress not least in the fact that it has a powerful resonance for today’s society where euthanasia is very much on the social agenda.
Theatre at its most powerful makes us more fully alive, more individual and yet more closely connected to each other. It can also shake the passivity that history proves can be so dangerous.
