The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940

A play set in France in 1940, following political theorist Hannah Arendt and two other German Jewish women arrested as German forces advance. It is staged at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, east London.

The show is a play set in May 1940. It centres on three German Jewish women arrested in France: the political theorist Hannah Arendt, then 33, the artist Charlotte Salomon, and Eva Daube, a Communist schoolgirl. The story follows a turning point in Arendt's life, an experience that later shaped her writing on power and human rights.

Labelled "Undesirables", the women are taken to Camp Gurs, where they are held with thousands of other prisoners by the state that had once offered them refuge. As German forces move closer, each woman has to decide whether to remain and hope for liberation, or to risk everything in an attempt to escape into an uncertain and dangerous future.

The production is staged at the Arcola Theatre, a theatre in Dalston, east London. It suits audiences interested in twentieth-century European history, the lives of women under persecution, and the moral choices faced by people caught in wartime internment.