Aristides – The Outcast Hero

The fate of unsung heroes is a difficult business. Alice de Sousa’s reverent Aristides leaves no chance of her eponymous hero being left unsung, but methinks the lady doth protest too much.

I would like to think that real heroes understand modesty to be the best part of valour. Not so Aristides. We are constantly reassured by the narrator, as if his own self-proclamatory rhetoric (‘history will vindicate me!’) were not enough, that he is a ‘veritable hero’. Like the confessional Washington, Aristides’ (his full name is incanted countless times) is unwinningly quick to elegise his religion, his conscience and his principles. The phrase ‘money shouts, wealth whispers’ is well extrapolated.

You might think I am criticising a fictional character here. I am not. The man himself was responsible for issuing thousands of visas to fleeing refugees in Bordeaux, saving countless lives. I do not seek to criticise the facts, rather the theatrical presentation of the character, who is lost somewhere, leaving us in doubt as to what to think of him.

We are shown his weakness to believe his reality, but we are not given enough to like, love or feel sorry for the man. His affair with a sickly-scented French temptress (one way in which the intimacy of the Galleon theatre is imaginatively exploited, I think) is one aspect of this. And we are given much additional doubt about his willingness to do the right thing: someone who literally goes grey before opening the floodgates is clearly in a paroxysm of monumental proportions.

In the end he comes across a decent man who is faced with a moral duty, not an ‘insuperable dilemma’ as the pompous ‘world première’ programme cants, and he does the right thing, greatness thrust upon him. But the hero we are so forcibly instructed to worship dies weak and wronged with his hated mistress, his poor wife long gone. His death is underwhelming.

Perhaps the main problem is that we are shown the wrong side of the story. Shocked accounts of a pregnant woman ‘wetting herself’ in the queue and Jews being tattooed with wrong end of a needle constitute poor attempts to impress the scale of evil and suffering, dulling the edge of his great efforts.

The best parts of the play are the few urgent moments when life and death seem real, visas as lives, effected by an excellent Barry Davis as Rabbi Chaim Kruger, rather than the consular affairs of an affable but fairly prosaic civil servant. The acting and production is solid enough, the project of recognition noble enough, I just don’t know if the character is big enough for the story.

Aristides – The Outcast Hero is showing until February 22

The Galleon Theatre
Greenwich Playhouse
Greenwich Station Forecourt
189 Greenwich High Road
SE10 8JA

Box office: 020 8858 9256