We bring partnerships alive to the particular risks and opportunities that they face, and help people to build the relationships they need to manage them.
Susannah Finzi
In the last few years, amongst other things, I’ve been writing fiction. So far, the result is a number of short pieces for stage or screen at draft stage and BLIND EYE, an ambitious moral/political drama which had its first public outing this year.
I first had the idea for BLIND EYE in 2006, as a short film based on real events. By early 2008 it was evident that it would work as well, or better, as a stage play and I asked stage director Benet Catty (benetcatty.com/) to help me develop it. Benet proved to be an exceptional mentor and a person of rare intelligence and insight who encourages with his commitment and energy yet who is meticulous in insisting again and again that “it can be better still”.
So the BLIND EYE characters evolved, the story became more complex and the themes more varied but the central premise remained the same: when push comes to shove, what do people actually do, especially when others are looking the other way?
Although the background to the play is a Nazi war crimes trial in the early 1980s, BLIND EYE is not a play about the holocaust. The case is the motor which drives a story of the conflicting interests of a human rights lawyer and a peace negotiator, and of the legacies parents leave their adult offspring.
Blind Eye is about characters who find themselves driven up against and beyond their own moral boundaries They do what they perceive as the right thing, or the expedient thing, or the only possible thing. They find themselves doing bad things for good reasons; the effect of moral erosion, denial, the compulsion to “set the record straight”. They become divided against themselves, and the cost is integrity.
A rehearsed staged reading of BLIND EYE was held at the Prince of Wales theatre in February 2009 directed by Benet Catty with a cast of nine professional actors. Responses from the largely industry audience were immensely positive and the piece stood firm and absolutely captured its audience. I’m now in discussions about possible productions in the UK and the United States.
From my BLIND EYE scrapbook
People say apparently trivial things that immediately and irreversibly change situations. People appear to be just talking, but they’re telling a story with a purpose. People pursue their secret agendas, they dance, they enchant, they create smoke screens, they suck other people into playing the game on their terms, they manipulate from positions of apparent helplessness, they play out their aggression in the subtlest of ways, they avenge the terrible wrongs they believe have been done to them - decades later.
They lie.
“I was in bitter combat for my own identity of which my father seemed to me to be the unlawful keeper” (John le Carre)
‘There is no reason in things, only chance and miracles’ (Hans Magnus Enzenberger)
"The dream of reason produces monsters." Goya's inscription on his etchings Los Caprichos.
“For, as thou urgest justice, be assured thou shalt have justice, more than thou desir’st” (The Merchant of Venice)
"There’s another war somewhere, what they call a minor one, though of course it isn’t minor for anyone who happens to get caught in it. They have a generic look about them, these wars – the men in camouflage gear with scarves over their mouths and noses, the drifts of smoke, the gutted buildings, the broken weeping civilians. Endless mothers carrying endless limp children, their faces splotched with blood, endless bewildered old men. They cart the young men off and murder them, intending to forestall revenge, as the Greeks did at Troy. Hitler’s excuse too for killing Jewish babies, as I recall." (Margeret Attwood. “The Blind Assassin”)
“Grave harms occur because of what large numbers of people do or fail to do” (Christopher Kutz “Complicity - Ethics and Law for a Collective Age”)
"The grey zone of collaboration with evil"
(Primo Levi)
“What would you have done?”
(Bernhard Schlink’s ‘The Reader’)