A play based on true stories. In May 1940, three German Jewish women are arrested in France – Hannah Arendt, who would become one of the 20th century’s most influential political theorists, the artist Charlotte Salomon, and the Communist schoolgirl Eva Daube.

Branded “Undesirables” and transported to Camp Gurs, they find themselves prisoners. As German forces advance, each woman must confront an impossible choice: stay and hope for liberation, or risk her life to escape into a dangerous and unknown future.

Blending satire, physical theatre and cabaret, The Banality of Evil draws on archival research and testimony to reveal forgotten histories of women caught between exile, imprisonment, and survival.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julia was born in Manchester and is the granddaughter of Romanian Jews. She also spent some of her childhood in Blackpool. At E15 Acting School, she trained as an actor. Her work as a performer was at the Traverse Theatre, the Royal Court and Nottingham Playhouse, as well as on film and television. She read English at London University and was awarded a PhD in 2016 from the Department of Theatre at the University of York.

She was a company member for two years at the National Theatre. She became the National’s first woman director in 1977 for her adaptation of Dorothy Parker’s poems and stories in the Platform Performance Men Seldom Make Passes. This ran for two years.

Her scripts include Theresa, A Dead Woman on Holiday, The Dybbuk, The Shylock Play, Woman in the Moon, Woman on the Bridge, Broken English, St Joan, Nineveh, Honeypot, Crossing Jerusalem, Old Newland, Blueprint Medea, A Manchester Girlhood, Charlotte Bronte Goes to Europe, Year Zero, Nineveh and Eleanor Marx: A life in movement.

Awards include the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, Arts Council of England, the BBC Alfred Bradley Prize, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, Moondance Columbine Prize, Goethe Institute, European Association for Jewish Culture, Sphinx Theatre 30-30, Dyspla and the Leverhulme Trust. Writers’ Residencies at the The Wiener Library and the University of York. Currently Julia is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute.