Gail Louw's dazzling play 'Blonde Poison' returns after phenomenal success with audiences at Brotfabrik in 2018. It's based on the true story of a woman in Nazi Berlin who betrayed others in order to save her family. Complex and morally ambiguous, 'Blonde Poison' doesn't try and provide easy answers - it poses questions which are still relevant today. It's gripping theatre.
Audiences said about Robert Chevara's production: ‘absolutely mesmerizing’, morally complex, intriguing and disturbing’, ‘superbly acted by the stunningly brave Dulcie Smart‘...
Stella Goldschlag was blonde and blue-eyed and identified as German – but her parents were Jewish, and like millions of other Jews across 1930's Europe, the teenage Stella was labeled an 'Untermensch', subhuman. She was persecuted, imprisoned, tortured. Eventually the Gestapo offered her a deal, if she turned in other Jews, they would take her family's names off the list for Auschwitz. What would we have done?
In 'Blonde Poison', the older Stella waits for the arrival of a journalist. She looks back on her crimes in a final effort to explain her actions and heal her relationship with her daughter. Memory is interwoven with lies and false memories in a thrilling, moving drama.
Playwright Gail Louw is South-African/British with Jewish roots. Her maternal grandparents were deported from Berlin and murdered in Minsk in 1942. Gail’s mother escaped - at the age of 14, she joined her older sister and an aunt in Palestine (later Israel).