CW: Depictions of fascism, Nazi iconography and language, antisemitism, ableism, misogyny, hate speech and discrimination, use of strobe lighting.
In dim blue lights we first met the children, who seemed otherworldly. These were the people who were killed in pre-war Nazi Germany, these children who “are not like mine or yours.” They were children who died at the hands of a doctor, Walter Fischer (Elliott Brain) who grappled with the anguish of having the blood of innocents on his hands. He agonised over the death he has brought about and how it was at complete odds with his desire to heal people, even as he was pushed by Nazis at every turn to obey orders from higher-ups and resist his own conscience. His role was to provide names of disabled German children so that the Nazis could round them up and murder en masse.
SUDS’ Chosen Ones, written in consultation with the Students’ Representative Council’s (SRC) Disability Collective, was a haunting and troubling play. Written by Joshua James and Sara Angelini, its subject matter was highly ambitious and difficult to carry off, although it managed to do so with the delicacy and compassion that was dearly needed. Directors Joshua James and Katherine Stonor were to be applauded for a marvellous show, managing a cast brimming with talent alongside stellar producers Adhiraj Singh Jamwal, Ella McGrath and Zoe Le Marinel. Lighting designer Cameron Nott also contributed to the ghostly atmosphere, flicking the stage to blue and red when Fischer was regularly visited by dead children in his dreams.
For the first time as far as I’m aware, the Cellar piano was dusted off and opened up, with George Tsarikis playing eerie music for the first twenty minutes after the theoretical starting time while SUDS members scrambled backstage and the audience stretched on their skinny seats: an unorthodox method to force the peanut-crunchers to appreciate classical music. Neil Chenglath pitched in as guitarist to add tense twangs to many moments of crisis.
Fischer asked his nurse Marianne (Cheralyn Liu) “Shouldn’t doing good things feel easy?” It carefully conveyed the sense of a world off-kilter, where moral principles were in flux and murder could be passed off as a civil service. Marianne injected an odd humour which jarred with the oblique references that she made to child euthanasia: “All of this is for a cleaner tomorrow.”
Jeremy Blewitt played Karl Schmidt, the Nazi soldier and quasi-friend of Fischer who flipped between charismatic and blood-curdling, making troubling jokes about “the beer of the Fatherland: pure, strong, German,” and later denouncing Fischer for having qualms about murdering children. “Do not think these children are the same as yours or mine. They may look like us, talk like us… but you must not forget that they are flawed. We do this for the greater good.”
Blewitt pulled off the highest point of tension in the play, in a scene which featured Fischer, Schmidt and a boy called Viktor Becker (Adhiraj Singh Jamwal) who Schmidt discovered hiding in the corner of the room. Striding towards the blanketed frame behind which Viktor was cowering, Schmidt seized the sheet without breaking eye contact with the trembling Fischer. He demanded the boy to say his name, and when Viktor mumbled it tremulously, Fischer roared “Louder!” Everyone in the theatre flinched.
Viktor was part of the play’s central conflict, as one of the children whom Fischer was hiding from the Nazis, alongside Amelia Hones, Jasmine Ho and George Tsakiris. His mother, Alice Becker (Sara Angelini), was like Fischer at once desperate to help and quasi-complicit. She, who had exhorted Fischer to protect the children when he was having second doubts – “Is your purpose not to save lives?” – refused to protect them herself when she had the opportunity to take her own son away. These adults seemed genuinely to care for the children, but their complicated agency or lack thereof meant the only innocent people were the children themselves.
The bitter pill of this play is that there was no neat answer. Even under the immense duress that Fischer faced in the story, the murders of disabled German children which he facilitated is something he could never accept. In one particularly poignant moment he spoke to a boy in his dreams whom he had killed, a child called Otto Wagner (Fransiskus Kurniawan). Wagner attempted to soothe him by saying “You couldn’t have saved me even if you wanted to.”
And like Fischer, we are left tormented by possibility and impossibility: the choice that Fischer insisted again and again that he did not have, and the tantalising chance of saving lives if he placed his own in even greater danger. In the final moments he met defeat at last, and the inevitable knocking of Nazis at the door. Cradling the children whom he had sheltered and attempted to desert, he cried “I really wanted to do something for you.”
Hannah Arendt grappled in Eichmann in Jerusalem with the immense difficulty of holding individuals responsible for monstrous crimes against humanity, critiquing Eichmann’s defence that “almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty. What you mean to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is. […] [But] there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done.” Chosen Ones did not shy away from the brutal reality of an era when atrocities were treated as altruism, but left us gazing into this abyss wondering what others might have done, if there was any path that could possibly bring about a “greater good.”
The Disability Collective, who sensitivity read the play told Honi “we gave feedback indicating significant concerns surrounding the excessive focus on Dr Walter’s moral dilemma at the expense of making the disabled children characters seem helpless. We are glad that the team has made – albeit after a delay in communications – changes that give the disabled characters more agency in response to our concerns. We received an apology from the team and we acknowledge the hard work that went into this production.”
Responding to those concerns, SUDS told Honi in a statement, “It should be noted that changes were made to the script to align with DisCo’s recommendations, including the addition of new scenes, and extensive character work by the actors portraying disabled characters.
“SUDS maintains that care was taken by showrunners to ensure that disabled characters were not portrayed using harmful stereotypes. The concerns raised by DisCo are related to the first draft of the script, which was not the version reviewed by Honi or performed by SUDS,” the statement said.
Chosen Ones played from October 9 until October 19, 2024, at the Cellar Theatre.
Correction: An earlier version of the story contained an earlier statement from Disco. The story has been updated to reflect their most recent statement. A statement from SUDS has also been added.
