Marylebone Theatre will play host to the world premiere of The White Factor, a new play described as a tragic story of hope and endurance in the face of tyranny.
Spanning several decades, The White Factory explores the life of Yosef Kaufman, a Holocaust survivor from Lodz, haunted by his wartime experiences as he tries to build a future with his new family in 1960’s Brooklyn. Tormented by the nightmares of his past, Yosef’s attempt to negotiate the weight of his own history becomes a passionate battle for survival and redemption.
This heart-wrenching drama of love, endurance, despair and hope follows one man’s journey from the Lodz ghetto of 1940s Poland to 1960s America, where the possibility of a new life is tested to the limit by the remnants of his past.
The production is a collaboration between playwright Dmitry Glukhovsky and director Maxim Didenko – both political exiles and outspoken critics of the war against Ukraine.
Glukhovsky says: “The White Factory was written a few years ago in what now seems to be a foreboding of the abrupt transformation of my home country into a fascist dictatorship. The great evil that has now torn the bubble and is streaming into the outer world as Russia began its barbaric war on Ukraine has been brewing there for the last few years and millions inside the country have been watching it either in indifference or in a naive hope that it would somehow never concern them.
“Millions yet chose to conform to the evil’s ever more strangulating rules, to accept its narratives and to believe in its poisonous myths. Watching a resentful and revanchist neo-imperialist regime grow and ripen from the inside, real-time, eye-witnessing ominous social changes that were certain to bring about a catastrophe, made me turn to my Jewish roots, recalling and researching another story of conformism and desperate hope for the better: the story of the Lodz ghetto. But as I wrote the play, I could never guess how quickly my fears would become a reality…”
Didenko said: “In my earlier works I have always been interested in exploring totalitarianism; the dark magic it has over people and the horrible price that must inevitably be paid for both succumbing to its charm and surrendering to the fear it sows. Right now, war and propaganda and new draconian laws silence all critical voices in Russia, my home country. The totalitarian regime is returning. People who oppose the war are being labelled as traitors and persecuted.
“Right now, hundreds of thousands of Russian intellectuals and artists, but also students and normal people who just don’t want to live under an archaic and repressive regime that started this war on Ukraine, on the West, and on normality, are fleeing Russia and trying to roll under the falling Iron Curtain.
“We are among this new wave of political emigrants. The story behind The White Factory seems to be more important, immediate, personal and dramatic than ever. This is why we’re doing it now.”
Written by Glukhovsky, directed by Didenko, with Ukrainian creative producer Ekaterina Kashynsteva, The White Factory will play at Marylebone Theatre from September 14 – November 4, 2023.