Last year,the Sydney independent theatre scene coughed up two remarkable one woman shows that critical acclaim and audience response demanded remounts.

One was Queen Bette, the Jeanette Cronin essay on Bette Davis which has already enjoyed a resurrection season.

The other is BLONDE POISON, the Belinda Giblin starrer which has transferred from the Old Fitz to The Studio at the Sydney Opera House.

Giblin plays Stella Goldschlag, dubbed Blonde Poison by the Gestapo, for whom she uncovered “U-Boats”, Berlin Jews who had submerged under the surface of the city, hiding from Hitler and his Holocaust. Born to a Jewish family – Stella’s father was a proud and cultured German, a decorated soldier of the Fatherland during the First World War- she was beautiful and blonde and Aryan looking. Her identity and sense of self was German, which she saw as sophisticated, cultured and glamorous, as opposed to the oafish, uncultured Jews, blown in from the East with their bowdlerised German, Yiddish.Her Jewry was jettisoned from religious ritual, and the modern construct of “cultural Jew” didn’t really apply either. No connection, nothing Jewish that binds. She rhapsodizes that her father had more in common with Hitler, musically at any rate, hating jazz and championing Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert.

For many years, Stella was able to pass as Aryan, but as the Nazi noose tightened and the decree for a Jew free Berlin, Stella was arrested and tortured. Stella had to make a choice. To save herself and her parents from being shipped out to the extermination camps, she agreed to inform the Gestapo of Jewish families in hiding. The Nazi’s reneged on their assurances of her parent’s safety, but Stella continued to do their bidding. In 1945, Stella gave birth to a daughter, who, with the backhand of history, embraced Judaism, immigrated to Israel and disowned her mother.

More akin to Nathan Englander’s What We Talk about When We talk About Anne Frank than, say, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, BLONDE POISON is perhaps close bosom to Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil.

Nothing banal in this performance though. Belinda Giblin’s reprise portrayal of the role that garnered her a Best Actress Nominee in last year’s Sydney Theatre Awards is a fiercely focused affair, physically and vocally agile, the embodiment of an elegant, glamorous, vainglorious grandmother with a high calibre sense of entitlement outraged that she should feel guilt for surviving. She takes Gail Louw’s text and interrogates it, finds the poetic invective and soars with spectacular stanzas of spite. Unlike her proud, obsessive oral hygiene, Giblin’s Stella discovers that over the decades, the plaque of guilt cannot be brushed away with the paste of self-justification and the cavities of moral decay can run deep and deadly.

BLONDE POISON is playing the Studio at the Sydney Opera House until the 12th May.

http://www.blondepoison.com.au