The Land of the Living at the National Theatre
“All my life, all your life, I’ve struggled with this: was what I did wrong?” These words in The Land of the Living carry the weight of the entire evening. The play circles, obsessively and unflinchingly, around accountability. How do we ever know if the choices we make are the right ones?
At the National Theatre, David Lan, former Artistic Director of the Young Vic, presents a work that takes us to the aftermath of the Second World War. Europe is left in ruins, its population scattered. Millions are displaced, many unsure of where home is, or if home still exists at all. Among them, countless children. In wartime, the child embodies the figure of the victim: the one who has no part in the machinery of violence, yet is caught in its teeth.
At the centre of this story is Ruth, played with staggering brilliance by Olivier Award-winner Juliet Stevenson. She is a UN relief worker charged with rehoming thousands of children stolen during the Nazi Lebensborn programme, Himmler’s scheme to “enrich” the Aryan race. Through this programme, children – primarily from Poland but also from Russia and Ukraine – were taken from their homes and placed in German foster families, that is, if they complied with Nazi “racial” standards. They were deprived of their names, their languages, and, ultimately, their very identities. Ruth and her colleagues are left to sort through the aftermath: identifying who these children are and deciding where they should go.
Lan structures his play across two time frames. In 1945, Ruth encounters Thomas, a boy taken in by a German family. She removes him and begins the painstaking, often cruel process of tracing his origins and deciding his fate. Decades later, in the 1990s, Thomas returns as an adult to confront Ruth on the decisions she had to make. The dual timelines unfold with thriller-like precision, the audience shuttled between Thomas’s youth and adulthood, asking at every turn: what became of him? What made him so furious? What, ultimately, did Ruth decide?
The play insists on a central, excruciating question: to whom does a child belong? Many of these abducted children had grown accustomed to their German homes. Some no longer remembered their original names. Returning them meant inflicting a new trauma on top of an old one. And yet there were the families, whole villages, even, waiting with open arms, desperate to recover what had been taken. The play offers no consolations. Every answer carries a wound.
Stevenson delivers a performance of rare depth, moving fluidly between the relentless relief worker of 1945 and the older Ruth, cornered by the adult Thomas. At one moment, she is on a train bound for Poland, at another in her own living room, or in the hostel where children waited while their futures were determined. She maintains an unflagging intensity, giving her character a complexity that resists neat moral categories. Was she right? Was she wrong? The play leaves the question somewhat unresolved. Stevenson’s Ruth is a woman striving to do her best, though her judgment is also clouded by her sense of self-importance and the conviction that she has a grand mission.
Thomas, grown, is embodied by Tom Wlaschiha with equal brilliance. His performance vibrates with contradiction: childlike and world-weary, furious yet tender, both drawn to Ruth and repelled by her. A pianist in the story, he plays on several occasions, conveying his grief and accusation through the music. Artie Wilkinson-Hunt (on press night), as young Thomas, is remarkable for so young a performer. His anger has a raw, violent edge, yet he reveals himself to be playful and forgiving in the way only children can be. He shifts between English, Polish and German, embodying a child uncertain of who he is or where he belongs.
Apart from young Thomas, the children remain unseen. They are evoked instead through clothing, baggage and a soundtrack that envelops the audience in the chatter of absent voices. Torn from their homes, displaced and treated like objects, they are invisible to adults, reduced to numbers to be repatriated, cases to be processed. Only the adults are visible, moving in a kind of perpetual chaos. They speak in English, German, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian: a deliberate cacophony. The disorder mirrors the reality of postwar Europe, a continent fractured by nationality and language, overflowing with displaced people. It’s a mess. And there are no easy answers. Only choices made, and the lifelong burden of living with them.
The Land of the Living is powerful and important, especially for audiences unfamiliar with the Lebensborn programme. At two hours and 45 minutes (including interval), it can feel lengthy at times, yet you’re compelled to see what unfolds next. Its relevance is undeniable: the daily images we witness – children uprooted by conflict, robbed of home and future – echo profoundly throughout the performance. Children remain, as always, the most haunting symbols of injustice.
Constance Ayrton
Photos: Manuel Harlan
The Land of the Living is at the National Theatre until 1st November 2025. For further information or to book, visit the theatre’s website here.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
YouTube
RSS