The Father, the Pogroms and the Parallel

A performance about how quickly - and seemingly painlessly - language use and mentality can shift in a society, and how the unthinkable suddenly appears entirely natural. A performance about the Holocaust in Romania and Sweden today.

In 1923, the outlook for democracy in Romania seemed quite bright - all people, including Jews, Roma, and other minorities, were guaranteed equal rights. Twenty years later, genocide was a reality, with some of the world's most brutal pogroms, particularly against Jews, featuring concentration camps, death marches, and violence so extreme that the Allied Hitler urged Romanians to carry out the killing more cleanly. The performance begins with actress Adriana Savin's search for her father's life and survival as a Jew in Bucharest during World War II, and is also based on writer Mihail Sebastian's diaries from 1935-44 - the period when Romania adopted Nazism as ideology - as well as observations of anti-democratic tendencies in our own time.

Participants: Adriana Savin, Henrik Dahl, Peter Perski, Gaianeh Pilossian.

Idea and text: Adriana Savin (text with Henrik Dahl). Direction: Henrik Dahl. Dramaturgy: Vesna Stanišić. Music: Dror Feiler. Movement direction: Andromachi D. Lindahl. Set design: Magnus Lindberg. Costumes: Ulrika van Gelder. Lighting: Jonatan Winbo. Makeup: Cais-Mari Björnlod. Producer: Hanna Melanton Appelfeldt.

A production of Teater Tribunalen.