The White Crow is an incredibly intense two-hander, intense even for a two-hander, set as it is on the first day of the interrogation of Adolf Eichmann after his removal from Argentina to Israel by Mossad in 1960. In case you don't know Eichmann is regarded as the organiser of the holocaust: he was never in a position to start it, and possibly never in a position to stop it, but he was the person that masterminded the train timetables and the logistics of moving the Jews and the other "undesirables" to the concentration camps. An extra layer of intensity within the show is added by the fact that his interrogator lost her husband and (probably) her children in the camps and spent time there herself.
Despite thinking it's an interesting setting for a play I found myself rapidly struggling to engage with it.
Some of that was structural, for example the show starts in German with a translated voice-over which I found incredibly distracting, and intermittently had Eichmann talking over what I think was historical recordings of speeches which was also confusing to my poor ears.
Some of that was the set: they start off in a glass office on the stage. Whilst this makes sense as an interrogation room, it comes over rather too literally as a barrier between the audience and the actors. In Act II the barrier is gone, and we're in the room, but I can't help feeling a different set design would have worked from the start of Act I more directly.
And some of it was the characters. There are moments of sympathy for both characters; Eichmann in particular as he shuffles in, blindfolded, no laces in his shoes and no belt so he has to hold his trousers up is a pathetic figure. But when he says he transferred to the security services because he fancied himself as a movie-style bodyguard standing on the running board of a car with a gun he came across as more disingenuous than naïve, and when he first utters the line "But I was only following orders" all sympathy fled. When he denies any feelings of remorse and refuses to accept any responsibility, that turns more to despite. His interrogator has her moments too, when she weeps for her children and strokes the photograph that you are led to believe is of her children, that's quite moving. But, she's an interrogator, she flips back and forth between wheedling, shouting and beating the information (at one point literally, live on stage) out of the broken old man before her and that makes it hard for me to follow her emotionally and sympathise with her. It's not hard to see how a survivor of the camps turns into a strong, capable, determined woman but it is hard to see how she turns into an interrogator and implicitly at least a torturer.
There could have been something interesting in the story - insight into Eichmann, insight into Israel, even insight into the CIA and extraordinary rendition and the torture at Gitmo. Whilst there are flashes of this, particularly the comments about "the new language" they are so fleeting that it appears they're accidental rather than deliberate and they're not developed, just pass through the spotlight and out again. And that, ultimately, is the fatal flaw of this play. The characters don't engage, and the story doesn't feel like there's a story - it's a "day in the life of" rather than a story and that feeling of something happened yesterday, something else will happen tomorrow ultimately makes it struggle as a show as this day just passes through the spotlight of the show and out again.
