Craft Theatre to Bring A NAZI COMPARISON to Waterloo East Theatre

A Craft Theatre original, devised from Hanns Johst's "Schlageter" and Contemporary Political Rhetoric, A Nazi Comparison will run at Waterloo East Theatre 3rd - 29th October with press night on 4th October 2017.

Confirmation bias: also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses.

How engrained are aspects of Nazism in our current political climate? The reality might scare you. Craft explores this question in a new hard-hitting and piece of devised satirical theatre.

Clare, a young woman at university happens upon an English translation of a play written by Hitler's favourite playwright. Unshockingly it upsets her deeply; less expectedly it upsets her entire world view. Every line of script shows an uneasy familiarity and Clare begins to realise the strong parallels in how the media was manipulated then, and now.

Filled with anxiety that the world is far from as noble and progressive as people are led to believe, Clare digs deeper and deeper, tumbling down a rabbit hole that eventually isolates her from everyone she knows and loves. Friends shun her; her parents dismiss her; she becomes sullen and confrontational. Her life begins to implode; she is fired from her job and expelled from her studies.

Her anger consumes her. If the truth is the truth then why won't anyone listen? Clare's thoughts turn more extreme and she soon finds extremists to confide in. Together they begin a dangerous plan. As Clare continues in her quest for truth, does she reveal her worst fear, or does she become it?

In The Nazi Comparison, Craft Theatre has taken Hanns Johst's Schlageter, an expression of Nazi ideology, with all of its very real Nazi perspective, and juxtaposed the piece with contemporary political rhetoric from leaders around the globe. How far do the similarities go? With allied foreign interventions and religious profiling, are we really the 'good guys' that we think we are? Or are we the baddies of the world?

We often wonder how ordinary people went along with what the Nazis were doing. We like to think we'd have stood up and said something. Craft asks; to what extent are we are those people now? What parts of society prevent us from asking the right questions, or prevent us from believing the truths when we do find them?

The Nazi Comparison uses and hard hitting realism juxtaposed with occasional dark humour to tell the story of a human awakening, aligning the emotional revelations on stage with the personal realisations that the audience members themselves are encouraged to experience.

Craft's founder and director; Rocky Rodriguez Jr, uses cognitive neuroscience and techniques inspired by legendary theatre director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski, to forge an original way of working, with the aim of promoting powerful, and authentic acting and connection. Drawing on Craft's long held experience of devising work, the story is designed to demonstrate the complexities of human connection, of relationships and moments.

Utilising a large catalogue of very recent real news stories and videos which show our governments and societies behaving in very questionable ways, it becomes harder and harder to argue that some of the actions we see today could not indeed be straight out of a Nazi administration. With the facts laid bare, Craft weaves real life stories with a fictional person 'awakening' to confront the depth of the lies they have been told, and that we have often willingly believed.