The Pianist: Not entirely convincing musical of Oscar-winning film

The extraordinary story of how Polish Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman survived the Holocaust in the Warsaw ghetto has been told in his own best-selling memoir and Roman Polanski’s 2002 film, for which Adrien Brody won an Oscar. Even though music sits at the heart of Szpilman’s narrative, I was wary of this stage musical, believing the subject and the form to be terminally at odds.

In fact, director Thom Southerland’s bare-boards adaptation, using Szpilman’s own compositions and deploying an ensemble of actor-musicians around a sombrely black baby grand piano, is a qualified success.

The tragedy and triumph of the story comes across clearly, partly because it’s barely been dramatised. Instead, Daniel Krikler’s Szpilman delivers the narrative largely as a monologue, into which snapshot confrontations or family flashpoints are woven.

The music consists mostly of breezy, coffee-house love songs which don’t really fit or have any internal coherence: eight lyricists are credited, including Szpilman’s son. But the mere fact we know they were by the man himself elevates the endeavour.

Two passages of Chopin supply gravitas and eloquence. In the second half, snatches of an instrumental composition, Life of the Machines, chime with the jarring events and the industrial nature of the Nazi genocide.

Almost all of the actual piano-playing is done by the musical director Malcolm Forbes-Peckham, expressionlessly, in white tie and tails, at the baby grand. Which sounds counter-intuitive, but which actually works, enabling the onstage Szpilman to dissociate from and observe his own life.

The piano itself is shoved and pulled around on a platform piled with refugee suitcases and a radio: it does duty as a tank, a ghetto checkpoint, or the structure of the collapsing building where the starving Szpilman holes up.

The Pianist - Ensemble

Rich Southgate

The undying power of music is a metaphor for his miraculous survival. However, rather too many subordinate characters here suggest that Szpilman must be saved because of his talent – because he is “special”. Szpilman, surely, never suggested that one life was worth more than another.

And as every version of his story makes clear, young “Wladek” was part of an exceptional family at an exceptional time. His parents and three siblings were talented classical players – his brother Henryk is derided for composing songs that are “catchy” – living high in cosmopolitan, wealthy Warsaw.

This world is suddenly shattered, like the windows of Polish National Radio blown in by bombs while Szpilman is playing, when the Nazis arrive. Yellow stars are issued, and Jews are segregated behind the ghetto wall. “The inviolability of our property and our lives will be secure,” insists Wladek’s father, the first of several moments of overemphatic foreshadowing.

The horrors told to us here can’t be quite as vivid as they are in the book or the film: the old man lapping up spilled soup from the ground; the child beaten to death by a Nazi on one side of a wall while Szpilman tries to pull him through from the other.

An exception is the moment when his family is taken away. Andrzej Goulding’s slatted set becomes a railway cattle car, from which they stare, their instruments suddenly soundless. Wladek’s later increasing isolation and emotional and physical etiolation is never as profoundly felt as this.

The hostility between Wladek and his brother Henryk (Nitai Levi) is overplayed through largely inappropriate songs, and most of the subordinate characters are sketched in. But in the central role, Krikler has a fascinating, other-worldly manner, as if he’s experiencing events in real time and in recollection as part of a reverie or fugue state. The final number, Out of the Darkness, when he finally presses the ivory keys, expresses both his wonder and his guilt at surviving.

Szpilman died in 2000, aged 88, in Warsaw, a riposte to Hitler. Again, I wondered what a stage adaptation in a 200-seat north London theatre could do that the book and the film hadn’t already done. But there is something about seeing live humans enact this story of human endurance and playing the music of the man who lived it.