The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 41

14 Th OuanNan Wednesday March 5 1997 Loving him to death Looking for an uplifting night out? Leona Heimfeld wants you to watch a play about the Holocaust. Then another. And another. And another. Anne Karpf reports A night to remember catch Emmerdale (ITV) now and then, and, when I do, something ghastly seems to be happening.

Nothing remains of the everyday story of Emmerdale Farm but those little lambs bounding in the opening titles. Emmerdale now is a sort of Wuthering Oops! written by Gertie Bronte, the ungifted sister of the more famous three. The last time I dropped in, Dave Glover had burned to a crisp, saving his baby son from a blazing house. Dave, a lanky stable lad, had been having an affair with Kim Tate, the squire's lady. The squire put his wife under house arrest and bought their baby for a million pounds.

(Look, it's nothing to do with me. I just sit here.) Emmerdale's panting publicity calls Kim the Bitch of Emmerdale. I don't know. She seemed a nice enough woman to me, particularly in jodhpurs. Last night Kim's car and decomposing body not going to be a pretty was dragged out of Frank's flooded quarry.

I am never very happy about decomposing bodies. Well, vultures apart, who is? They always turn out in the end to be someone you've never heard of called Muriel. Frank (Norman Bowler), seizing opportunity firmly by the forelock, sobbed inconsolably into his baby. Fortunately, an unusually placid child. "She can't be dead! She can't be! She doesn't deserve this! I loved Kim! A lot of me died out there today when I saw her lying dead.

I hurt her and she hurt me, but we were made for each other. Why, why did she have to die?" As Frank and Kim made Punch and Judy look chummy, this threnody was thought excessive by some. To wit the police, who will shortly feel Frank's collar. Any listings magazine will confirm that next week "Frank faces the wrath of the The wrath of the courts. Even lawyers are livelier when soaped.

"It's a balancing act. It's on a knife-edge all the time. When it's going well, it's dancing. It's always shifting underneath you. You feel it moving around underneath you, underneath your bum, and at time you feel like you're in touch with every single component.

You feel like you're in touch with the molecules between the rubber and the road. I'm able to feel totally in control of the situation and it's almost a kind of freedom. There's nothing like it. It's a skill I've learned and a kind of expression as well because, when its going well, I'm able to bond, blend into one. It's very, very satisfying." Who is talking about what? Wrong.

Damon Hill on Formula One driving (Clive James Meets Damon Hill, ITV). lx'oiiu Heimfeld, named after the grandmother who perished in Ausch-witz, was born and raised in Uis Angeles. "I knew I had to find an a identity away from my family." she recalls, so in 1979. aged 19. she went to Bangor to study English and drama, later moving 'o London, where she met and married Peter Wolf, a librettist who made a distinguished debut last year as a radio dramatist.

Her career has since included spells as Max Stafford Clark's assistant at the Royal Court, John Barton's assistant at the RSC, and staff director at the National Theatre. Polyglot is a particularly bold enter prise, since Flolocaust iconography has been forged by film, not theatre. Our images of the atrocity are newsreel based grainy, silent and distant. The theatre, by contrast, trades in words, movement and imme diacy Won't it necessarily banalise? And isn't a single-issue theatre com pany a limited theatre company? Heimfeld is having none of that. "Theatrical images can provide the survivors' subjective point of view, rather than the documentary perspective of the camera.

And the single issue is so huge and has so many issues coming out of it that are all to do with living in Europe in the nineties." She isn't drawing analogies with current events, but pointing to underlying questions, like how people can dehumanise each other to the extent that genocide becomes pos- Nancy Banks-Smith SHIRLEY Valentine is always invoked when Jan Ruston's story is told. Jan went to Cyprus, Aphrodite's island, and fell in love with Paul Georgiou, a fisherman. "This was a woman of 42 and suddenly she's lb again. It was wonderful for her," said Sharon, her cousin. But I was reminded more and more of Birds Of A Feather.

Sharon and Jan are Essex girls. They grew up together and thought they would grow old together. In A Deadly Secret (BBC1) Sharon said, "I always thought Jan and I would be two old girls, tottering up the High Street towards Debenhams. Always a dream that one day we would still be together and it won't happen now." She leaned over Jan's bed with a snap of two skinny-legged children. "Happy days, weren't they, Jan?" The woman in the bed looked like an unburied corpse.

Paul did not tell her he was HIV-positive, and now she is dying of Aids. The East End of London moved out to Essex. Family feeling is so tight you can twang it. Jan's family is fighting to make the reckless transmission of Aids illegal. This is uncharted territory, but there is an old Cypriot law that would cover it.

In Cyprus, Sharon is on the phone and her voice is politely implacable. "I need to speak to the Attorney General before I leave." "Honestly," she adds under her breath, "they couldn't direct traffic." In Basildon, Jan's mother and father share her care devotedly. Her father rubs his forehead as if thought hurt. "It's so devastating. I get upset when I think of it.

I'd give my all for her. If I could swap with her, I would willingly." Her mother ruffles her last wisp of hair so it stands up like a cock's comb. She says, "Jan had this terrific argument with God but 'I won in the she said." The aunts flock in. "She'll be sick of the sight of us three old crows. Aren't I right, Jan?" says Auntie Connie.

What guts. Sharon arguing with the Attorney General. Jan arguing with God. The whole family facing television, which is a frightening thing. Unless you've faced Aids, when it isn t.

The sponge of the soul can only absorb two soaps If you watch three, the surplus emotion sploshes around and makes your socks wet. So I only Deadly Jan knew Paul was the man for her but not that he was HIV-positive ELLA HEIMKKLl) was 1-1 years old when she arrived in a cattle truck at lAuschwitz in May 19-14 A Polish prisoner sorting the luggage pointed at her and asked. "How old?" Her mother replied, "14, to which he immediately responded, "No, 18." Bella understood then that she must say she was 18: "She aged from 14 to 18 moving down the ramp," says her daughter, the theatre director Leona Heimfeld. It was Bella's first moment of survival: her mother was sent straight to the gas chambers. Bella was then asked her age by-Josef Mengele.

who demanded that she turn around and around before him, as if to check her veracity. "It was like time stood still when she turned around. I've got that image of her turning, endlessly suspended in time and space while one person decided her fate." Eventually Bella's luck appeared to run out: she was sent to the gas chambers but they'd broken down, so she survived once again. Bella's story forms part of In Extremis, an anthology of four plays by Bonnie Greer, Bernard Kops, Peter Wolf and Guardian journalist Maggie O'Kane, intercut with dramatised testimony from Holocaust survivors. Leona.

who interviewed 25 survivors for the work, describes the tales of escape as modern Miracle Plays. Bella and her husband now live in the US, but they're coming to London to see In Extremis, which opens tomorrow at the Young Vic Theatre Studio. Leona clearly believes they'll have plenty of company: her theatre company. Polyglot, deals exclusively with the Holocaust. "We focus ori those moments or aspects that enabled people to survive physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually the incredible ingenuity, but also luck," says Leona.

Yet her mother lost two of her sis ters, and survived the death marches to arrive at Belsen with severe frostbite. Doesn't dwelling on the miracu-lousness of survival risk distorting the Holocaust, providing the happy endings we all crave? "If you depict only the horror," Leona says, "you lose any sense of how people coped and their means of coping. It was another world, but it was still a world in which human beings struggled to retain their humanity" So Kops's play is based on a Chagall painting about a dream world and explores dealing with loss after the war has ended. And Greer's piece rests on many survivors' conviction that they stayed alive only because they had a relative or friend whom they could look after and who in turn would look after them. sible, and the corollary that em pa thy keeps human beings human.

Like every other fringe company. Polyglot, founded in struggles financially Prominent grant givers wince at the idea of plavs about the Holocaust, though Heimfeld stresses the uplifting aspects One of her next projects is to dramatise Theo Rich mond's book Konin. about a win ished Jewish community in Poland Heimfeld directed Kops's award winning Dreams Of Anne Krank at the Polka Theatre, and shares ms disquiet at how Krank has become for so many young people the emblem of the Holocaust raising their consciousness, certainly, but also limiting it. "My mother was one year younger than Anne Prank." she points out. "I did Bernard Kops's play because I thought people should know what happened to Anne Prank later, and it shouldn't just end when the hiding place is discovered.

I'd ask children what was the worst thing that Anne Frank suffered, and they'd say hav ing to keep quiet or not being able to go to the loo. It was as if they thought it was about the fact that if you put eight people together in a room they drive you mad." As a matter of policy. Polyglot includes refugee? actors and actresses. Among the six actors in In Extremis, all professional, two are Kurdish and three Jewish. One, Ruth Posner, is herself a Polish Holocaust survivor.

Heimfeld believes all those involved can draw fruitfully on their own experiences. O'Kane's play, set on the death marches, transposes tes timony from modern-day Bosnians. But isn't there a danger of flattening and homogenising discrete expert ences? "The quotes fit exactly," says Heimfeld, "but I'm not trying to draw parallels between different experiences that would diminish both. 1 am trying to find a contemporary language to present the Holocaust, and think about what their reports would have sounded like if there had been eyewitness journalists present." The company's debut production of Joshua Sobol's Ghetto in 1995 ended with an audience discussion. One night, after a crowd who had all grown up in anti-Semitic Iraqi Kurdistan had debated the situation of the Jewish community in Vilna in 1942, a man came up to her.

The discussion, he said, had been a huge crossing of barriers. That made Heimfeld glisten: this is what she wants for Polyglot. In Extremis it at the Young Vic Studio, London SE1 (01 7 1 -928 6363), from March 6-22. Anne Karpf 's Th War Attar: Living With The Holocaust is published in paperback by Minerva next month. vlfe Rn In Extremis (above) depicts a world In which humans struggle to retain their humanity.