In 2017, two teams of artists and scholars - one at the University of Sydney in Australia, another at Stellenbosch University in South Africa - worked together to re-imagine a satirical musical called The Bedridden Prince. The musical was originally created by Czech-Jewish prisoners in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1943 and, according to survivor testimony, it put a comic spin on corruption and favouritism in the ghetto.
Although the script was not preserved, the creative teams had just enough material - the songs, a souvenir poster with a list of characters, and survivors' memories of specific moments - to create a plot outline that they subsequently developed, with local actors, into two fully staged performances.
Join us as we celebrate the edited volume, A Holocaust Cabaret, which documents the creative process and presents the two final scripts. Artists and scholars from both projects join Lisa Peschel, the editor, to discuss the tremendously moving experience of working with The Bedridden Prince.
Find out why they decided to embark on this project and what did they discovered through the process of bringing this work back to life.