Canned Goods
20 January 2025
Southwark Playhouse Borough
5.0 out of 5.0 stars
Canned Goods, currently running at the Southwark Playhouse Borough until 8 February, is a political thriller based on the true history of Hitler’s false flag operation preceding the invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939.
Set in the round, this compelling production gets by with very little stage dressing. A small raised area doubling as a walkway between two prison cells is the central focus of the stage, and the main setting for most of the plot. Honiok, a German farmer recently arrested by the SS wonders why he was taken from his farm and his animals, he did nothing wrong and argues tentatively with the soldiers imprisoning him. He soon meets Krueger, a Nazi sympathiser trying to ingratiate himself with his captors, and Birnbaum, a Jewish teacher and theology scholar, in the cell across the way, both having been transported from Dachau concentration camp and also looking for answer for why they are here and what is going to happen to them. Tormented by the guards, they try to get answers from charming, committed to the cause SS Major Naujocks, getting very little actual information.
The mix between slowly unravelling the false flag plot in which the three prisoners will be sacrificed to start a war in the hopes of appeasing other countries – stopping them from stepping in through a home-cooked justification of having been attacked by Poland first -, scenes in which the three men discuss their imprisonment and the political and social situation at the time, and monologues from each of the prisoners explaining their world view, their experiences, their convictions and struggles, Canned Goods is a stunning exploration of how far people are willing to go to further a cause they are wholly convicted is right and just.
Terrifyingly current and timely, the play explores political and philosophical ideas, extremism and the power demagogues wield in uncertain times. History repeats itself, and education is the strongest weapon against it. Canned Goods is an unmissable play that slots into our current political landscape alarmingly smoothly.
