Before I go on, I have to start by saying this was a brilliant experience. The monologue is superb and Maureen Lipman is, well, mesmerising. If you still can, buy a ticket right now.

So now I can go on to say – this play made me so angry. Why? Because it is the most painful reminder that we never learn; that we are for ever repeating the same mistakes over and over again; that the horrors of the past will be the horrors of the future. Nothing seems to change; or if it does, it seems to change for the worse.

I am not British, so forgive me for not being an expert on British history. So I had not heard the story of the Exodus. Listening to Dame Lipman was the first time I learnt of the British shooting at Holocaust survivors, including orphaned children, on board the ship that was carrying them to safety. I could not believe what I was hearing, I refused to believe that this was fact not fiction – I had to google during the interval…

Can we mandate this play for Suella Braverman? Maybe if she is forced to see it, she will stop for a moment to think how her actions of today will be seen eighty years from now. I cannot help but wonder how Ernest Bevin would feel to see the way he has been portrayed. What makes this even more powerful is the way the story is told, so matter of fact, so devoid of anger… The resignation of a person that has been through hell and back only to be shipped straight back to hell again by those who pretended to be supporters. Displacement – not something anyone with a home can ever understand, I imagine. I am a Polish person in London – not quite displaced, but post Brexit – I have some street creds, just a little, but still.

But Suella’s stance is only one of the examples of evil living on in perpetuity. This story is filled with such examples. On one hand Rose comes from a Ukrainian shtetl called Yultishka that is subjected to a Cossack attack; on the other a Ukrainian collaborator in the Polish ghetto kills her daughter – all this flavoured by Russia’s ‘special operation’. But the most poignant example comes at the end – I do not want to spoil it for anyone, so I am not going to write about it. But if you do not cry, then you should question your own humanity. Seriously. This goes out to my Palestinian best friend – I doubt this would be a play on your ‘to watch’ list – but go and see it, you will understand why I am suggesting you should.

And of course since, I have now read some reviews. Those that have written that act one is better than the second act – this is an entire monologue – split into two as even a superwoman like Maureen Lipman needs to take a break. There is not a part one and part two as such, not in my mind at least. The second half might be less fascinating for those who need to brush up on their knowledge of the horrors that happened in Warsaw in 1943 when the ghetto went up in flames. But it is that second half that shows the consequences – the consequences that carry on in perpetuity. It is the second half that tears at my heart much more.

And those reviews that take issue with the crassness of some of the words, imply that maybe there are too many easy jokes… I can only go by my sample of one. My grandfather survived a Nazi workcamp. When Rose talked about the staging of the Polish ghetto in a play she saw visiting her son in Israel, that it was a little too clean, a little too pretty, and where was the stench (forgive me any inaccuracy in the quotation, I was not taking notes) – those were pretty much the exact words my grandfather spoke to my mother, when after many decades he made the trip back to Dachau. He just added that if the place had looked like it looks now, he would have enjoyed his time there tremendously.

Rose is mourning a culture of a by-gone era. She is morning the Jewish culture that she both rebelled against as a child and yearned for as a displaced person. She did not seem to notice when the Nazis marched in on Poland – just the day before she was eating chocolate cake at a café. Incredulous you say  – but was that not exactly what happened to the entire West? Rose cannot tell her real memories apart from movies, plays and stories told by others. But is that not exactly what is happening to so many of us right now – using social media to merge reality with what we wish reality actually was and getting lost in our own deception?

And Maureen Lipman plays the role so convincingly, even if she loses the Yidish ‘twang’ from time to time. Doing nothing but sitting on the bench and using a few restrained movements of the hand, she paints a picture of decades, of hurt, of anger, of rebellion, of womanhood. Could you imagine listening to any of your friends talk at you for over two hours and hang on every word they say? Chapeau bas.