The Pianist - Museum Of Science And Industry - 3/07/07 by Julia Taylor

The abhorrent acts of the holocaust and their effect on Jewish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman were movingly recreated in Roman Polanski’s award winning movie, The Pianist.

But compared to two-dimensional film, the live performance of this bitter tale, part of Manchester International Festival, gets to you so intensely that you want to cry. Siting the true story of pianist Szpilman’s experiences in an attic room in the Museum of Science and Industry, a former warehouse, is appropriate.

What better place to illustrate his solitary escape from abasement, deprivation, torture, starvation and terror and his own experience of being holed up in similar surroundings. After sharing his last meal with his family – a toffee divided into six pieces - Wladyslaw sees them, and thousands of other Jews, off to their deaths “like the twittering of caged birds in deadly peril.”

Such quotations are priceless because narrator, Peter Guinness in collaboration with theatre director, Neil Bartlett, tells the story in Szpilman’s own words giving an eyewitness account of events in Warsaw between 1939 and 1945. Speaking quietly, and without over-emphasis, Peter describes walking past corpses in the street and other horrors so matter of factly that they become far more real than if he had used histrionics.

The accompaniment of concert pianist Mikhail Rudy, whose own family suffered persecution in Russia, portrays in music the writer’s feelings. His sensitive performance of both Szpilman’s own compositions and Polish composer, Chopin’s sombre, yet well-known, works were just as effective as Peter’s words. You could say that it was piano music, some imagined, some real, which saved Szpilman. It uplifted and comforted him in his worst moments.

And our belief in human nature is restored when his performance of Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor on a derelict piano amidst bomb-flattened buildings, moves German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfield to help him. After the film version, I sat reverently through the credits until my composure returned.

There was no such opportunity this time and I came out to a virtually tram less Manchester, still shaking from the experience. I had buses to take me home. The Jews just had trains to take them to concentration camps.