The White Factory Reviews

"Holocaust drama raises troubling questions about today’s tyrants"

"Set in a Polish ghetto, Dmitry Glukhovsky’s superb play explores the terrible choices made by people under occupation"

"Warmth towards a drama, though, must be justified by the hottest creativity, which the play achieves by honouring Jewish dead and survivors while also engaging with today’s Russia and wider politics elsewhere."

"While unsentimental about real-life figures – sexual harassment by Jewish leaders is frankly dramatised – the play accepts, as surely viewers must, that their deals with the Nazis were not collaboration but tactical desperation: whatever it took to reduce the death toll."

"This small off-West End venue again delivers National Theatre-level production values."

"As Yosef and Rivka Kaufman, Mark Quartley and Pearl Chanda stunningly act out unimaginable calculations that go far beyond the queasily schematic bargain in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice."

"It is a tribute to performance, writing and production that the play is received in rapt silence underscored by stifled sobbing."

"... Dmitry Glukhovsky’s wrenchingly powerful The White Factory examines what happens when we deny that humanity."

"It’s an epic, galvanising drama: a rollercoaster of peaceful private moments, sudden casual violence and gathering despair. Some of the exposition is clunky, some of the dialogue stilted. It’s best when simply and tightly focused."

"Maxim Didenko’s stark staging plays out as an act of remembrance, characters washing their hands as they enter, live video documenting the action, and is peppered with great performances."

"Adrian Schiller gives a terrific performance in a drama about the Łódź ghetto that could definitely have been made more sensitively"

"‘The White Factory’ has some very valid and psychologically acute stuff to say about how victims become collaborators. But some of it feels like traumatic cliche"

"And the fictional Kaufman’s journey from nobility to degradation feels too much like a simplistic didactic lesson, as if Glukhovsky didn’t trust the audience to grasp the significance of Rumkowski’s story."

"‘The White Factory’ is pretty good. There’s a lot more money behind it than the average fringe production, and it shows with a cast that’s worthy of the National Theatre. But I don’t think the script would pass muster there yet – there’s a level of care with regard to this most sensitive of subjects that hasn’t been fully met."

"Let down by baggy script"

"Harrowing Second World War story fails to land thanks to a baggy script and misguided direction"

"What happened in Łódź is a neglected part of history, but here its retelling is let down by a baggy script from Russian writer Glukhovsky and a misguided production."

"Where the production delivers is in Galya Solodovnikova’s stage design. A nod to the white factory of the play’s title, where the pillowcases of the deported were restuffed, it’s a clinical space that with time becomes scarred by the growing death toll"