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Fiona Ramsay portrays a Jewish Nazi collaborator
Evil comes in an array of forms, and Jewish Nazi collaborator Stella Goldschlag was a particularly vile character. Blonde Poison, the play about her by Jewish playwright Gail Louw, opens next week at Daphne Kuhn’s Auto & General Theatre on the Square. It’s a one-woman work, directed by Janna Ramos-Violante, based on the book Stella by Peter Wyden. Veteran performer and Wits University lecturer Fiona Ramsay, who took on the role last year, spoke to SA Jewish Report about getting under Stella’s skin for another season.
ROBYN SASSEN
Ramsay, who grew up in Johannesburg and was educated in Cape Town, is a sister-in-law to Louw, whose mother, Ruth Levy, was a Holocaust survivor. We started off by talking about the messiness of history in staged drama, and how to represent a real person.
“Gail sent this play to me; I sent it to Daphne, who initially recoiled at it. She said: ‘I don’t think it’s the sort of material my audience would like to see, because this woman, the protagonist, is so vile.’
“So, we did Miss Dietrich Regrets, another of Gail’s plays,” she says. Staged in May 2015, it was well received; Ramsay says its attraction had to do with German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, a larger than life character.
The year unfolded, and the artistic director of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, Ismail Mahomed, asked Ramsay to propose plays for the festival’s solo project.
“The theme was war and solitary confinement, and the focus was on women,” says Ramsay. It was a no-brainer to propose Blonde Poison. Their proposal was accepted.
“We went down to Grahamstown on a shoe-string budget. It had a very successful run. Daphne then booked it for her theatre and we did it last year.”
The season was immensely popular and for several weeks after it ended, the theatre’s phones were still ringing for bookings. Ramsay is cautiously optimistic about the new season, which opens on January 30. “It’s always a risk,” she says. “In my experience, when you redo things, they have a slightly different life. Something else happens. The world is a slightly different place.”
For an actor to get under the skin of a real person and “be” them is an interesting task; Ramsay explains how she prepared herself. “Initially, I read the book,” she says. “I think Peter Wyden, who appears in the play as Paul, was rather infatuated with her, as most of the men that she encountered were. When first I read the book, I found her to be vile.”
Learning a monodrama is challenging, says Ramsay, but it is about the story’s sequences. “And once you’re kind of in it, it has a life of its own. When I worked with director Sylvaine Strike on the Dietrich play, she said that she noticed that I started ‘osmosifying’ into Dietrich. That is what fascinates me about theatre. It’s about submerging, until you become the character.”
And where does the depravity of the character fit in? Ramsay doesn’t hate her. “It’s difficult to hate a character when you are playing them,” she says. “I love playing wicked people. And I think it’s because I’m not a villain in real life. I’m quite empathetic, and therefore it makes the villain three-dimensional. If you are not a nasty person yourself, you can be very nasty indeed on stage. It’s the ability to immerse yourself into something that is so other from yourself.
“No one wants to be loathed on stage. Actors want to be understood by the audience. But doing Blonde Poison now serves to remind people of the danger of that very possibility of betrayal in a society gone mad. You only have to look at US President Donald Trump saying he’s going to stop immigrants, and for me, in a sense, the relevance of the play – apart from the horror of what she did and what happened and why she did it – is in how we, as a society, treat hypocrites.”
Should Stella be condemned? “I think she’s brazenly presented. She doesn’t apologise for herself and she offers many resonances with history. Think of the time of spies and impimpis and sell-outs that we’ve weathered here. It’s about how far people will go to protect their family’s lives.”
And that’s where Ramsay feels Ramos-Violante’s direction is spot-on. “She emphasised Stella’s bluntness,” she says. “Not feeling sorry for herself was her saving grace.”
Does Stella have longevity? “I think so. What she did resonates – in America, in Syria, in Mexico. I don’t think it will date. She’s a cipher of man’s inhumanity to man.”
• Blonde Poison runs from January 30 until February 18 at the Auto & General Theatre on the Square in Sandton; the theatre will host Sunday matinee shows to accommodate religious Jewish audience members. Phone 011 883 8606 or visit www.theatreonthesquare.co.za