Review: Who is Claude Cahun? Southwark Playhouse

Claude Cahun, to answer the play’s title, was a queer artist and writer, anti-Nazi freedom fighter and surrealist – a complex person at a complex time. Gloriously so. 

Having been born in France in 1894, she moved to Paris, changed her name in 1914 and butted heads with the male-dominated world of the surrealists. Producing some strikingly modern photos and books (please Google) with her lover and collaborator Marcel Moore, they moved to Jersey just as the Nazis invaded. This was doubly precarious for Cahun as, along with being queer, she was Jewish. Both fought back with a resistance campaign of words and kindness, but have gone largely forgotten from the surrealist and WWII narrative due to their sex and sexuality.

All this can be gleaned from Wikipedia, as I did years ago after stumbling across one of her photographs. In it, she is in a checked jacket, hair slicked and blonde, eyes accusative, utterly androgynous. I assumed it was maybe from the 60s, realising only later that it was taken in the 1920s.

Clearly, Cahun has been begging for the spotlight for decades, and although it has finally swung around, that certain something proves elusive. The multiple settings – cosmopolitan Paris and island Jersey – the many, many characters, and the struggle to depict surrealism prove a task too big for D.R. Hill’s book and David Furlong’s direction. Along with a late change in lead actress from Lilt Lesser to Rivkah Bunker, the odds are not in the play’s favour.

But let’s count the positives first, shall we? Amelia Armande as Marcel Moore, the loyal and level-headed lover and photographer, keeps a calm, almost stately grace throughout, balancing the caprices of Bunker’s Cahun. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Gethin Alderman gives 1000% energy as the main baddie: the Nazi investigator and similarly evil French surrealist artists. Bunker certainly looks the part and, considering the minimal lead-up she has had, she never stumbles on her many lines.

Ok, now the rest. Juliette Demoulin’s set really grasps at the two polar opposite settings with a boulder-cum-chaise-longue, arches, rocky-looking walls and a wardrobe, but we sadly never really believe we are anywhere other than a back room in Borough. The script is so overweighted with either surrealist rambling, stiff pronouncements on gender/sexuality, or unwieldy stereotypes that all the work of the cast and crew is rather squandered. The main Nazi is an OCD psychopath, the women saintly trailblazers against a world of almost demonically dismissive men. These things are most likely true, but come across as melodramatic and flat.

The main issue is the worlds the two inhabited – filled with gritty reality and danger – fail to feel real. The surrealist camp are reduced to odd, Charlie Chaplin-like caricatures who reject Cahun as being not being feminine enough. Issues deepen when we get to the Nazi invasion of Jersey, and the writing makes everything more like Spike Milligan’s 1971 book Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall than any serious depiction of the evil and contradiction of the period.

In an attempt to do justice to a many-layered human, this production gets rather wrapped up in itself. Jeffrey Choy’s projection work with Cahun’s art is a highlight and one of the few moments when we see the person poke out between the characters. It is doubly disappointing, as she has been overshadowed for such a long time, and this is such an exciting break in that cloud cover. I only hope that those who see it, or read this, research, download, and experience the reality of this truly unrepeatable personality.

Written by: D.R. Hill
Directed by: David Furlong
Set design by: Juliette Demoulin
Video Design, mapping artist: Jeffrey Choy
Produced by: Exchange Theatre

Who is Claude Cahun? plays at Exchange Theatre until Saturday 12 July.