Drowned Or Saved? Interview with playwright and director Geoffrey Williams

If I say the name Primo Levi, would you know who I’m talking about?

The works of the Holocaust survivor, who was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, are actively taught in Italian schools. Yet for too many in Britain, his life has little meaning.

But playwright and director Geoffrey Williams, whose play Drowned Or Saved? is now premiering at London's Tristan Bates theatre in Seven Dials, hopes to change that. 

His debut tells the story of Italian Jew Levi, 40 years after he was liberated from Auschwitz in 1945. Of the 650 men, women and children in Levi’s convoy to the camp, only 20 made it out alive. “I hope that this play might lead people to Levi’s wonderful work,” Geoffrey tells me. “Everyone I’ve worked with on the project who didn’t know Levi when I brought them on is now reading him.” 

After the end of the Second World War, chemist Levi returned to his hometown of Turin, where he wrote his wartime memoirs, If This Is A Man and The Truce. He later published a collection of essays, The Drowned And The Saved, which saw him meditate on the moral “grey zone”, regarding Jews who helped the Nazis in a bid to survive. It was this work that gave the play, informed by Geoffrey’s background in psychology, its title.

“Drowned Or Saved? is about the burden of a life spent giving testimony,” explains Geoffrey. “Levi’s was a mission of understanding, and survivor guilt is unavoidably part of the tapestry. The play is attempting to illuminate, in some small way, a man who cannot stop carrying the weight of the past, so he struggles to exist in the present.”

The show treads this fine line between past and present by having the Jewish prophet Elijah guide Levi through his memories. “Elijah is Levi’s guide because of what he represents in Jewish theology: hope for a better tomorrow,” says Geoffrey, who is of Jewish heritage. 

Marco Gambino as Primo Levi

Italian Marco Gambino stars as Levi, and is joined by Brazilian Paula Cassina as his wife Lucia. Trilingual Alex Marchi, born in Italy, stars as Elijah, and RADA-trained Eve Niker plays Null Achtzehn [Zero Eighteen], a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz. “Having an international cast — and especially two Italian actors, who grew up learning about Levi — has been invaluable and brought a wonderful richness to the production,” Geoffrey says.

And what inspired him to write it? “My work is, by definition, second-hand. I wrote it because I believe active interpretation is so important as part of the ongoing, open-hearted engagement with what happened and Levi’s past. I have tried to create something beautiful but challenging and unsentimental, exploring his internal struggle. I encourage disagreement and hope that this play will lead to others offering their own interpretations.”

This need for “open-hearted engagement” with that period in history seems to have taken on an added importance as of late. With rising global and national tensions in 2018, and talk of anti-Semitism prominent in politics, Geoffrey is keen for audiences to take away Levi’s message of “considered understanding”.

“It is particularly valuable in today’s political climate of combative hysteria,” he says. “Levi was criticised for it, being branded as ‘the forgiver’ by fellow Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry. But to me, Levi did not want to condemn simply because he had been wronged. Instead, he sought to make sense of his oppressors without condoning their actions. This is not the same as forgiveness, and I think there is a profound lesson to be learned in the mission to understand those who have wronged you.”

Geoffrey, whose past work includes assisting on The Restoration Of Nell Gwynn at York Theatre Royal and The Railway Children at King's Cross Theatre, feels that this kind of necessary engagement is unavoidable when it comes to theatre. “My past experiences both as a theatre maker and a theatregoer have illuminated just how much the theatre demands your attention,” he says. "It is a medium where the audience participates, however quietly, in the creation of the artwork each night. You can put down a book, turn off the TV, but it’s an active choice to walk out of the theatre.” 

As Levi’s biographer, Ian Thomson, says: “It is very difficult — even potentially indecent — to turn a life such as Levi's into theatre. But this play is no mere entertainment; it makes you think, and think hard, and that is more than enough.”

Levi’s death at the age of 67 was ruled a suicide, and is a fact which, for many writers, tragically defines his life. But Geoffrey chooses to instead focus on survival.

“One of the questions I think the play asks is: ‘What does it mean to have survived?’ I don’t think his death changes the value of his work or his legacy,” he remarks. “The play depicts Levi at the end of his life as a vibrant man — at times naughty, at times desolate. There was lightness in him. There is humour” — including the cheeky Yiddish jokes peppered throughout the play — “in even the most desperate of situations; in fact, humour is often our only way of coping.”

Drowned Or Saved? runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre until November 24 (tristanbatestheatre.co.uk)