Blonde Poison Reviewed
While anxiously waiting for a journalist to knock on the door, 70-year-old Stella Kübler nee Goldschlag nervously begins to tell her life story.
In more or less real time, this one-woman show sees Belinda Giblin’s character defend herself against the predicted, probing questions to come from the memoirist. As her life unfolds, the audience is transported back to Nazi Germany. Stella describes her life as a young, beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde Jew. She echoes the sentiments of the era with the führer’s disgust for the unassimilated Eastern Jews; her Aryan features allowing her a limited advantage.
The audience is challenged by Stella’s confession that she worked as a “Greifer” for the Gestapo, denouncing fellow Jews to be sent on the next cattle train to Auschwitz so that she could escape the same fate. Stella confronts the modern audience, that can so easily dictate right from wrong with the luxury of distance, by protecting herself with the only sadistic means offered to her. Could any of us really know what we would do in the same position? But Stella finds a sadistic pleasure in her role that can’t help but unsettle the audience.
Giblin is captivating. Not once do you yearn for another character; their presence would only hinder her force. She manages to create a character that is arrogant and cold, but still elicits some empathy from a conflicted audience. Her stiffness on stage intensifies Stella’s ‘German-ness’ and an inability to let her guard down, even in her own home.
But what really makes the play resonate is that it is a true story. Stella Kübler notoriously combed Berlin for underground Jews, earning 300 Reishsmark for each one that she betrayed. Her charisma and good looks truly made her Blonde Poison.
