The playwright David Crook will discuss his work after the reading
Wednesday 30th August 2017 @ 19:30
Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who helped save the lives of over 100,000 Jewish people in the latter half of 1944 in occupied Budapest. This was the only community in Europe where a significant number of people survived the Holocaust.
When the Russians advanced on Budapest they viewed Wallenberg with suspicion. They imprisoned him in Moscow, and he was never seen again.
The play imagines the interrogation of Wallenberg by the Russian secret service.
It provides accounts of Wallenberg’s acts of defiance against successive regimes in Hungary, and of Swedish officials’ half-hearted negotiations for his release from captivity, in details that are broadly consistent with what we know.
Wallenberg has often been seen as one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, and in the final decades of the last century a raft of films and plays treated his astonishing story. Yet, surprisingly, there has been virtually nothing since.
* Please note that in the play Wallenberg's antagonists are a Stalinist agent and a Gestapo officer so some of the language in the play is anti-Semitic.