Patricia O'Donovan and Ian's Daughter

Olga Levitan, July 2007.

An article about the show written by Dr.Olga Levitan.

"The puppet show “Ian’s Daughter”, created and performed by the Jerusalem artist Patricia O’Donovan, offers us an unusual artistic phenomenon: the subject is the Jewish Holocaust and the public, children over the age of eight. The subject demands the search for the appropriate theatrical media with which to express a tragedy that resists comprehension. One has to consider the age of the children and allow them to face horror and emerge from the experience unscarred. This seeming contradiction between the needs of the audience and the subject matter, are the bases on which the artistic language of the show is built and the source of the dramatic tension that runs throughout the show. With these questions in mind the artist has to find professional answers regarding the choice of theatrical media and the concrete themes with which to present the Holocaust to children. Patricia O'Donovan chooses narration as the structure for her play which allows her, as narrator, to fulfill two objectives: to bring children close to the subject without fear and to create for them a healthy distance from which to face it.

The artist on stage plays a character that reenacts her childhood memories and describes the events that took place in the town where she was born, in Holland, during World War II .It is important to note that it is Anita, the protagonist herself in her child’s voice, that tells us most of the story about herself, her Jewish mother and her non-Jewish father. We do not hear her speak about fear of death or extermination camps, but of the daily changes she lives under the German occupation, such as the sudden distance friends take from her the moment they hear the rumor that Anita’s mother is Jewish. She feels compelled to hide her identity and keep secret she is Jewish. Anita doesn’t understand what is really going on around her and her naiveté is clearly expressed when she describes the new world around her as made up of the “good and alike” people (the German and Dutch) and the “bad and different” ones (the Jews). The child interprets the events as irrational and absurd which is clear to see in her games: one of her dolls differs from the others in a facial feature and is rejected for being Jewish. O’Donovan makes use of the techniques of meta-theater. The show “Ian’s Daughter” is in fact Anita’s own show, played with her dolls as she reenacts scenes from her own family life. The complex language of meta- theater, based on illusion and the intricate relationships between reality (in this case the history of the Jews during WWII) and imagination (Anita’s playing the events as she believes them to be true) are easily accepted by the children.

The show opens with a poetic image: the Angel of sadness flies over tiny houses of the Dutch village. Holding the angel in her arms, O’Donovan looks like a magic figure, that speechless and with very few and light movements, moves to a mysterious, tense yet calm music. They both look down on the village below, and O’Donovan helps the angel pick up in his wooden hands, a little house which he rocks it as if it were a baby before putting down again. The slow rhythm with which the actress moves amplifies her actions which become clear and meaningful. This slow pace seems to work against the brevity of the scene and it is precisely this play of rhythms that is one of the main components of the work.

The lowness of the rhythm allows the children to grasp the symbolism at play, and to enter the world of the show. Together with this, the brevity of the scene does not allow its seriousness to weigh on the public.

The magic figure gradually becomes a girl. Silence is broken and the narrator tells the audience that the tiny houses and the map with its roads and fields are the Dutch village where she grew up. She then sits down among them and all of a sudden decides that time has come to enter her home, so she quickly gathers the houses together, and in a playful way, puts them all in a box.

Once again she becomes the magic figure that speaks in slow pantomime and turns to the side to pick up an object that looks like a Torah scroll, she unrolls it over the village map and what at first seems to be a sacred text is nothing but a diagram of the interior of her house. From the moment she opens and unfolds the scroll, she becomes the young girl that totally absorbed by her play, tells us what happened to her village during the Holocaust. The transformation of Anita from adult to girl happens gradually helping the young audience, used to being told what happens on stage verbally, to accept and believe in her. The grown ups on their part, discover the poetic and metaphoric aspects of such transformation. In order to better enact the child, O’Donovan decides to reduce her stature and instead of standing in front of her public, she sits down cross legged at their same height. This inspires the children’s trust as they see in her one of them, a short being in a world of tall ones. The quality of her voice lacks the “childish tone” so common in children’s theater which also helps her create a genuine and trustworthy character.

The real flesh and blood Anita has a double, a wooden doll made from old furniture which recalls archaic sculpture and this doll as all the other ones that represent Anita’s family, look like Torah rods. We have here a visual language whose symbols are taken in unconsciously by the children and interpreted by the adults. Anita’s story is heard through three voices: the voice of the adult narrator, of the child Anita and of the doll Anita. The text passes from mouth to mouth from one to the other generating a special intensity which conquers audiences of all ages. This also creates the effect of one show inside the other, since the artist plays the role of Anita who tells her story though the doll which represents her. The child’s story takes on a double function in bringing the audience close to the subject of the Holocaust and keeping them distant enough not to feel fear. This simultaneity of phenomena gives the show Ian’s daughter its artistic quality.

The drama develops in two levels. A linear level shows what happens to Anita’s family during the Nazi occupation when her mother is obliged to wear a yellow star and her father pretends to collaborate with the Nazis in order to save his wife and other Jews hiding in his home. This level is important since it creates the background for the second associative level that shows the emotional world of the little girl as she tries to understand the events around her.

The central theme of the associative level is ‘The Other” and one’s relationship to it. Anita has a black doll, different from the other blond fair skinned ones, and

finds herself having to explain to her sister why this black doll is also part of the family. A German official that appears to Anita in dreams sends off to their death any of her dolls which look different or weird such as the black doll and a giraffe with a short neck. Anita’s best friend, a Dutch classmate, accuses her of having a tortoise different from hers. Throughout the play it becomes clear that for Anita, to be “different” means to be Jewish. When she plays with some cubes, it is obvious that the yellow ones are different from the reddish ones, the first representing Jews, the second everybody else. The little girl’s innocence is revealed both at the linear level as she tries with all her might to hide the fact that her mother is Jewish and at the associative one as she nevertheless feels different. Her play enhances how ridiculous this division of people is into the same ones and the different ones.

The fact that the artists remains a long time seated in the midst of the diagram that represents the interior of her house, limits her movements on the one hand, but on the other accentuates the importance of each of them. She also uses parts of her body symbolically as elements on stage whose function is to describe actions and places. On one occasion the crossed legs of the artist form a boat where Anita’s dolls, her children, are seated while the upper part of her body takes on the role of the boatman that rows the boat. In a memorable scene with no words the artist paints one of her legs and hands with yellow, a color that represents the Jews. Her body thus becomes divided into two, since one hand is Jewish and the other not. At this moment one hears the sad wailing of klezmer music and an act of pantomime ensues between her hands and it is clear to all that one hand insists on being around the other. This is what we call total theater. With her body she exposes the absurdity of racial discrimination. The theme of one’s relationship towards ‘The Other” is central to O’Donovan’s work, and connects the war years and the Holocaust with our own present times.

There is no doubt that this is a historical show that without didacticism, with wisdom and tact communicates the Jewish Holocaust to her public, both emotionally and intellectually. At the same time it is a completely contemporary show that by its way of dealing with history relates the past with life in modern society and expresses contempt to any attempt at racism. I would say that Ian’s Daughter is one of the outstanding shows for children, it is both serious and entertaining, it speaks in an artistic language and it brings us a balance so hard to find between the historical and actual, the emotional and intellectual, the fearsome and innocent, and the childish and mature.

Dr.Olga Levitan graduated from the Academy of Television, Music and Cinema of Saint Petersburg. Member of the Seminar for Puppet Theater Criticism of Saint Petersburg 80-85. She has published tens of articles on research and criticism of Puppet Theater. At present she teaches at the Theater Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Translated from the Hebrew by Dr.Patricia O'Donovan. January 2008.