The Banality of a Hannah Arendt Drama

Hannah Arendt was one of the 20th century’s leading Jewish thinkers whose phrase “the banality of evil “ was drawn from her seminal work on the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, published in 1963. Eichmann had been the architect of Hitler’s Final Solution, with Arendt’s writing chillingly dissecting the calm evil that fuelled the Holocaust.

Julia Pascal’s play The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940  however has scant commentary on Arendt’s study of evil’s banality. Rather, her 90-minute one-act drama focuses on the chapter of Arendt’s life who, as a German Jew had fled to France in 1933, that saw her in May 1940 being interned with thousands of other Jews in the Gurs prison camp, on the orders of the French government. There is therefore a distinct feeling that the play’s title, much like a tabloid newspaper’s sensational and attention grabbing headline, has been thrust exploitatively on to Pascal’s script in the hope of attracting an audience.

A talented all-female cast perform the piece, with imaginative movement and frequent moments of beautifully performed singing, mostly a capella. But the drama is disjointed and short of describing – in sometimes prurient detail – the appalling and inhumane degradation of life in Gurs, says little else, least of all about Arendt.

As an educationally historical play, the work disappoints, Pascal’s style proving so abstract and disjointed that she fails to make any coherent argument as to the banality of evil. That being said, a spin-off from the narrative is an explanation of a little of the history of the artist Charlotte Salomon, another internee at Gurs, who was later to be murdered by the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The banality of a clumsily constructed drama, albeit one that’s brilliantly performed.

Runs until 8th November at London’s Arcola Theatre