How do we deal with the wrongdoings of our forefathers? How do we disentangle ourselves from the net of guilt in which a bloody history of exploitation, domination, and colonisation has trapped victims and tormentors alike? If we let violence rain down on us as part of the law of retaliation, if we hold the other cheek, we let loose an inextricable spiral of vendetta. And if we bury the hatchet, the good old Freudian unconscious will settle things in its unpredictable ways, as Percival Everett’s surreal and funny take on white supremacists’ racist crimes The Trees has impressively shown.
According to the German lawyer and writer Ferdinand von Schirach, whose grandfather was an avowed Nazi and leader of the Hitler Youth, there is no such thing as inherited guilt: with every new life, the slate is wiped clean, and we have to be allowed to start afresh, unburdened by the guilt of those who lived and sinned before us, even if we’re bound to them by a common genetic pool, a family tree rooted in blood-tinged soil.
While
von Schirach admits that, even though there’s no inherited guilt, there’s a whole lot of shame, while he acknowledges that he has constructed his identity against his criminal grandfather, Anna Leader shows that things are even less simple and that, where there’s (blood) money involved, one can’t simply build a life free of guilt – a topic her play Stolen Ground shares with Yael van der Wouden’s Booker-Prize-shortlisted novel The Safekeep or Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.
In Stolen Ground, a privileged young white girl (Dorothée Neff) invites her Afro-descendant friend (Shadey Sinclair) to join her on a family trip to an unnamed former British colony, where her grandfather has lived and made a fortune. If this sentence contains way too many red flags for any reader to ignore, both girls, aged seventeen, are, at least initially, somehow blinded by their friendship – or choose to do the “ostrich-head-in-the-sand-thing”.
Upon arrival, things take an unexpected turn: after learning that her grandfather has died and that her friend’s future at boarding school is financially compromised, Neff’s girl proposes to give away her share of the inheritance she’s about to receive to her friend – without having any idea of the exact amount or property her grandfather might have left her.
As if things weren’t getting dark and complicated enough, the fragile equilibrium of their friendship gets tested by a series of increasingly alienating events: while the (nameless) girl’s father wants her friend to recite his deceased father’s favourite poem during the funeral – a poem by William Cowper containing the problematic verses “All selfish souls, whate’er they feign,/ Have still a slavish lot” –, only to prove to the community that their family isn’t as murderously racist as their grandfather will turn out to have been, the audience learns that the girl’s best friend’s mother comes from the very British colony her own grandfather has lived in and that their family histories might be entangled in a dark way, the blood-soaked cherry on the cake being a photo album in which baby showers, birthdays and Christmas photos have been replaced with pictural testimonies of the cherished grandfather’s questionable deeds.
One of the (numerous) rather strong feats of Stolen Ground are its multilayered characters. Everyone has skin in the game, no one is completely innocent: Neff’s character needs to learn that her naïve idea to give away her inheritance is part of what you call a white saviour tropism, and that you can’t just shake off the criminal past of your family through monetary compensation. The father’s wish to transform his dad’s estate into a school is rife with personal motivations: he wants his estranged wife to reconnect with him while simultaneously cleansing his father’s disastrous reputation.
Anouk Schiltz’s ingenious scenography is abstract rather than naturalistic, with characters moving on a reddish-brown soil one all too readily imagines soaked with the crimes of their ancestors, while the stage is illuminated in monochrome colours suggesting, but not imposing, different moods. Stage direction is mostly compelling, even though director Richard Twyman’s accentuation of emotion and his scenic transitions are sometimes a bit too heavy on meaning, conveying a message the text and characters have already made very clear.
Acting is mostly spot on – only sometimes, the cast of three slightly overacts or lacks a certain depth or suggestiveness; a depth that would for instance have allowed the two female characters’ homosexuality to evolve unconsciously and progressively instead of just popping up in a rather unconvincing way during the last act of the play. Philipp Alfons Heitmann’s father might be a bit of a pastiche of the white unconsciously racist boomer. Still, his character works pretty well as a much-needed comic relief, a Shakespearian jester who overplays his guilt with an almost hysterical nonchalance.
While father and daughter proceed with their own little narrative of denial, the grandfather ends up being projected on the wall, Marco Lorenzini being as majestically Lynchian as ever, his mute seniority a threatening presence haunting the play – and when he ends up reading Cowper’s (contextually) racist poem aloud, one can’t help but shiver with disgust.
At some point, the debate becomes a bit circular, the characters’ actions and discussions ending up in a rhetorical dead end of binary choices – while Sinclair’s character clarifies that simply paying her off with blood money won’t set things straight, the play never really opts for a third alternative, as if forgiveness wasn’t really an option. Here, it would’ve helped to put forward the girls’ amorous feelings towards each other, as this might have stressed the dilemma between their feelings and the racist crimes even further.
In Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, an almost identical situation appears at the end of the novel, and the writer manages to navigate around the narrative and ethical dead end, the political and intimate mingling from the outset of its intense first pages, the romance between the two women constituting a way out of a situation in which young Isabel finds out her parent’s house she’s been living in alone since her mother’s death actually belonged to the deported family of the Jewish girl she fell in love with.
Neff’s girl needs to choose whether to keep the photos of her grandfather’s crimes as historical proof of where she comes from or whether to burn them in a move of erasing the past and wiping the slate clean, reminding us of Ishiguro’s brilliantly allegorical novel The Buried Giant – through his play with genre, Ishiguro showed that neither forgetting nor remembering leads to forgiveness if the balance between the right amounts of amnesia and memory is off.
Nonetheless, Stolen Ground remains intense and captivating as the writer’s struggle to find definite answers to the ethically unresolvable and very personal questions her text asks become the rhetorical centre of the play. This leads to a finale that was somehow to be expected, although it is staged in an impressive scenography.
What Anna Leader shows, in the end, is that, as long as her characters don’t let go of the cultural and societal habitus they find themselves entrapped in, their ethically well-meant choices will always be rooted in the criminal pasts of their family. The fire’s final purification might be narratively foreseeable – it’s also a way of exorcising things, a small glimpse into the possibility of a better future.