The Mozart Question brings Morpurgo's death camp novella to all-engulfing life

Since it opened in 2018, the Barn, Cirencester has become Michael Morpurgo Central, enjoying an unusually close creative relationship with the former Children’s Laureate. With the pandemic-delayed premiere of a new theatrical version of The Mozart Question, that makes four productions of his work in as many years – but this is the most demanding.

His 2007 novella revisits the haunting fact that some Nazi death camps were pitifully alive with the sound of music: select musically talented inmates could save themselves, however briefly, by filling the air with commanded classical strains. They entertained their captors, ‘greeted’ arrivals, and provided a counterpoint of artistry, by turns sad and collaboratively sadistic, to the savagery and slaughter.

The subject was dealt with by Arthur Miller in Playing for Time (1980), initially a TV play, drawing on the memoir of Fania Fenelon, who played in the Auschwitz women’s orchestra. Morpurgo’s fiction, aimed at younger readers but not exclusively so, is mainly concerned with the legacy of that enforced accompaniment – how it expressed itself in guilty silence and punishing abstention from music tainted by association.

The Mozart ‘question’ concerns a world-famous Venetian violinist, Paolo Levi. He can wow audiences with Bach and Vivaldi, but never Mozart; ‘why?’ is a taboo question. Until, that is, he’s faced with a sweetly artless female journalist who blunders a response out of him that takes him back to his childhood, the discovery of a never touched parental violin, an encounter with a friendly old busking violinist and skeletons finally tumbling out of the family closet.

Where Morpurgo’s WWI classic War Horse is crammed with episodes, this story is more akin to a Venice-like labyrinth of small passages, leading to a grand canal of remembered horror that can only fleetingly be glanced at – the wartime period is covered in a handful of pages.

The brilliance of this adaptation by Vicki Berwick – directed by Jessica Daniels, with musical arrangements and original compositions by a young prodigy called Rudy Percival – is that it solves the ‘taste’ question, abstaining from overkill. Yet, harnessing the finesse of eight actor-musicians, it still brings the piece to all-engulfing life. A score that includes Rossini, Vivaldi, klezmer songs and – naturlich – Mozart gives rise to suspense and surprise, serves as a substitute for unspeakable feeling, and generates an air of shrieking carnage without bluntly depicting brutality.

The production is dominated by a wall of faded brickwork and plasterwork, symbolically strewn with papers and smartly lit so that the ensemble often morph into ghostly, silhouetted figures. Lara Lewis plays the curious, nervy journalist, then becomes the giggling inquisitive young Paulo; Matthew Romain plays Levi in older age, as well as his secret-harbouring barber father in flashback. Gestures of gaiety include a witty plucking at strings to suggest hair-dressing in action. The virtuosity of the playing is matched by simple, ingenious coups de theatre. Amid billowing smoke, Matt Ray Brown’s SS officer becomes an implacable and infernal conductor, commanding his charges to violently veer left or right in macabre accord with his life-or-death directives to the camp’s arrivals.

In 2019, Morpurgo argued the vital need for each generation to learn about 20th century nightmares, the Holocaust above all. With barbarity unleashed in Ukraine – and classical music heard amid the wreckage of its cities – a grim irony is that what would have been a useful theatrical warning from history then, has become a play for today.

Until April 30. Tickets: 01285 648255; barntheatre.org.uk