The Devoured

“Run from the beast, run from the beast, run from the beast…”

As the audience enters the room, Badac Theatre Company’s Steve Lambert is running on the spot, dressed in a torn and faded prisoner’s frock and staring wide-eyed into the spotlight above. With a coarse voice he is chanting “run from the beast,” the beast of Nazi oppression. As the lights go down we are on the cusp of the Holocaust.

Audiences and critics will divide sharply into two groups over this vicious tour-de-force as they most vociferously did over Badac’s 2008 offering. The Factory was a highly billed situational theatre piece that turned a part of the Pleasance into a network of Auschwitz gas chambers. Badac Theatre Company shaved their heads, armed themselves with bats and bile, and invited audiences on an authentic tour of Jewish persecution inside. Here, the scope is narrowed to a one-man affair and a small venue with seats.

The group will admire Lambert for his wild and reckless energy as he runs, shouts, spits and sweats without a single moment’s respite as the Jewish ghost he incarnates flees in abject terror from the beast. The performance is a single, unbroken climax, an unflinching ode to derangement and dehumanisation.

“Laughter and gunshots, laughter and gunshots, laughter and fucking gunshots” - short, unequivocal descriptions that spray out with his spit like machine gun fire, volley after volley after volley. “Constant, insane, fucking noise, constant, insane, fucking noise”- no time for reflection, no room for reason, just an agonisingly long, visceral imagining of what it might have been like inside the head of a Holocaust victim as the world around him collapsed.

The second group will see Badac’s unrelenting evocations of torture and terror as an obscene and distasteful orgy of aggression. There’s not a single moment of lyricism or melancholy or contemplation. The story is quite unashamedly one-layer deep and excessive in its brutality to the point of absurdity.

In one segment, Lambert describes the beast armed with barbed bats attacking fellow prisoners in his concentration camp, getting closer and ever closer as victims fall limp to the ground around him. A chant is repeated 20 times in a horrific musical frenzy, a maddening factory-line cacophony: “Jewish cunt. Rips the flesh. They scream. Nearer.” It’s pornographically simple, and worse still, it’s easy to imagine that Badac are cheaply exploiting one of the most sensitive of modern historical subjects for dramatic effect.

As a machine running out of power and coming to a grinding halt, The Devoured eventually just stops, and as a ghost phasing out of existence, Steven Lambert just turns around and quietly disappears through the curtains. By this point his prisoner’s frock has changed colour and is weighing heavily on his shoulders – it has been through a lot and absorbed an inordinate amount of Lambert’s sweat, in the most intensely energetic of monologues. It’s a striking reminder of the enormous commitment this actor has made towards Badac’s principles in a production which—notwithstanding difficult moral questions—undoubtedly packs a punch.