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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Niusia review – hard family history lessons and taboo-busting humour
This story, told by Beth Paterson, is about her 'nanna Niusia … and I remember her as a bitch'. It is quite the statement about her 86-year-old grandmother whom she was taken to visit as a teenager, when all she wanted to do was go to the movies. To Paterson, Niusia was an old curmudgeon full of complaints and cruelties. But she proceeds to take us on the journey that she went on after Niusia's death, when she became curious about who her Polish immigrant grandmother had been before settling in Melbourne. It turns out that she had been Holocaust survivor, although, typically for one who had lived through its trauma, she rarely talked about the time 'before'. Under the direction of her collaborator Kat Yates, Paterson excavates her grandmother's past, beginning with her successful businesses in Melbourne, which she singlehandedly built. But the drama then spools back to the beginning: her birth in Warsaw in 1922, her ambitions to become a doctor before her imprisonment in Auschwitz and, chillingly, the medical work she was forced to do under the Nazi eugenicist Josef Mengele. Patterson's attitude toward Niusia changes after the airing of these memories, sourced through her mother, whose voice we hear in recordings. This is a surprisingly warm play given its theme of the Holocaust and inherited trauma. Paterson is a sweet, perky storyteller, singing at times and incorporating her play-making process into her narration. Sometimes this seems pertinent, other times unnecessary. She brings some taboo-busting humour to the subject, which also only half works. It defuses the tension but sounds like random lines from an edgy standup routine. There are life lessons for Paterson along the way, which she speaks aloud, recommending books that are in brown boxes and which she reaches for at various moments. It is clear that the disinterring of personal history is part of an education – one she now imparts to us. The narrative strays from Niusia towards the end, on to Paterson's Australian Jewish identity and the anxiety of not being seen as Jewish enough – which could make for a play of its own. It is ultimately Niusia's story that grips. Paterson puts on an accent to bring her back to life. We hear that she went on to have twins after leaving the camp. As Paterson says, isn't that the best 'fuck you' to Mengele? Quite. At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 25 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
Edinburgh Reporter
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – Niusia ⭐⭐⭐⭐
'My nana was an iridescent entertainer. And I remember her as a bitch… She was a very savvy businesswoman and she played hardball… she was totally erratic, so you never knew if she was going to be kind or enraged. When I was growing up, I didn't get the vivacious [version]. I got the bitter and cruel and angry one.' It's a startlingly frank and vivid opening by Beth Paterson, whose multi-layered one-woman play, written in collaboration with Kat Yates, the director, melds together memories, storytelling and verbatim accounts of Niusia Rubinlicht, who was deported from the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War to Auschwitz. At the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland she was a forced assistant to Josef Mengele. Niusia, who came from a well-educated, wealthy Jewish family, was a nurse and had been studying to be a doctor via a correspondence course in Italy, being unable to do so as a woman and a Jew in Poland. At Auschwitz, she was an obvious forced candidate to help the Nazi doctor, known as 'the angel of death', conduct inhumane medical experiments on prisoners, mainly twin children, in pseudo-scientific racial studies. Paterson, 30, from Melbourne, gives a powerful performance, gyrating between her 'loud and prickly' nana – played with a somewhat hammy Polish-Jewish accent – various iterations of herself, and her mum, Susie, a psychologist and author, who features via a voiceover recalling as a six-year-old her 'very tender' mother: 'Give her an audience and she was absolutely, coruscatingly brilliant.' In an intense hour, there are graphic descriptions of Niusia smuggling out medication 'in her cavities' for fellow inmates and of the forced humiliation in which prisoners soiled themselves; then of her returning after the war to Poland where an antisemitic neighbour came at her with a knife. Equally, there's gallows humour, with Paterson slapping her bum at one point and noting how 'arse-shvitz' (yiddish for 'sweating arse') sounds like 'Auschwitz' and jazz music to accompany a party thrown by her grandmother during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, with Paterson picturing people queueing for the doughnuts she was making in the kitchen of her family home in the suburb of Elwood. The set flits between one of her grandmother's handful of Melbourne dress shops in the 1960s, her living room, a boarding house she ran and the nursing home where Paterson sings 'My Funny Valentine' and 'Blue Moon', addressing her as 'Moja kochana babcia [My darling grandmother]'. There's also what Paterson calls 'a liminal memory space' and as the action darts around it examines the effect on her of 'an awful lot of secrets and no-go zones' in her mother's childhood. 'Openness is our ethic,' she says. Probably the only Jew at an Anglican school, she didn't have a batmitzvah and calls herself 'Jew…ish'. During the heated action, books, including one on psychology, are angrily thrown out of cardboard boxes and gently put back in, while an empty armchair with a shawl draped over the back eloquently conjures up its multilingual missing occupant, who died, aged 86, in 2008. Niusia and her husband, Leon, we were told earlier, had met at a postwar displaced persons' camp and she gave birth, while still suffering from malnutrition two years after the war ended, to identical twin girls. 'Isn't that the best 'f*ck-you',' says Paterson. Summerhall, former women's locker room (Until Aug 25) Like this: Like Related
