Noga Flaishon on Memoriam and the ethics of VR history

As her sci-fi play Memoriam prepares for its London premiere, playwright Noga Flaishon discusses the ethics of VR, the commercialisation of history, and mining deep generational grief through dry, domestic comedy.

‘Nazis are excellent villains – classy, ridiculous, and able to lose without a shred of audience sympathy.’

Noga Flaishon is blunt. The British-Israeli playwright understands the macabre appeal of dropping a modern player into a historical atrocity. ‘I can understand wanting to pretend to blow up the crematorium or put a bullet between Rudolf Höss’s eyes,’ she admits. ‘But I can’t help the way this strange fantasy makes my skin crawl. I have a connection to these stories that won’t let me enjoy them.’

This deep-seated unease is the engine driving Memoriam. Premiering at Southwark Playhouse Borough this October, the Tangram Theatre Company production imagines a near-future where a tech firm extracts and sells human memories as immersive virtual reality. Rachel, a razor-sharp corporate buyer, sees a professional coup in harvesting the mind of her grandmother, Rivka. Rivka is the world’s last living Holocaust survivor. What follows is a bitter domestic dispute over legacy and ownership.

The price of silence

Flaishon anchors her cyberpunk premise in recognisable family friction. ‘Rachel’s relationship with her grandmother is loving, but injured,’ she explains. ‘A trauma like the one Rivka has been through is not something that would ever go away; it’s something that is passed on in a very real and physical sense.’

**The cast of *Memorian* L-R: Beverley Klein, *Jimena Larraguivel*, Rachel Barry, Ben Wiggins, and Ashley Margolis**

The matriarch is played by Beverley Klein, fresh from an Olivier nomination for Fiddler on the Roof. Flaishon shaped the role around a woman she met at seventeen—a survivor of Josef Mengele’s twin experiments who guided her school trip to Poland. ‘She was warm, kind and devilishly funny,’ Flaishon recalls. Klein captures that precise duality. ‘Beverley is so funny, and her dry humour fits Rivka flawlessly, but with time and space to explore the character, we saw how this humour serves as a defence mechanism. We explored the grief underneath and the endless love this woman has for her family. Watching the nuances of her work is a joy; she makes it look effortless.’

‘Nazis are excellent villains – classy, ridiculous, and able to lose without a shred of audience sympathy.’

– Nogia Flaishon

Conjuring the metaverse

Building a futuristic world on a fringe theatre budget requires ingenuity; it also requires acoustics. Flaishon views theatre as an ‘audio first’ medium, leaning on her pedigree writing audio drama for Big Finish. ‘Audio really triggers the imagination,’ she notes. She tasked sound designer Sarah Spencer with composing a score that was ‘intentionally emotionally manipulative’, conjuring a landscape inspired by ‘cyberpunk, digital worlds, and the dystopian nature of Apple Stores.’

The fictional VR goes far beyond current headsets. It incorporates smell, temperature, and texture. It obliterates the line between witness and participant. And it demands the audience interrogate their own voyeurism. ‘Memoriam’s tech was an exploration of this discomfort,’ Flaishon says. ‘How far can I take it? Can I make other people sit in this discomfort with me?’

While the premise echoes contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence, Flaishon draws a distinct line. Modern language models, she points out, are a fundamentally different beast. ‘The machine learns language as statistics and code, and because it does so fast, it seems insightful,’ Flaishon notes. ‘It doesn’t think or understand; all it has is pattern recognition, and it learns those patterns by consuming endless amounts of human-made data.’

**Memoriam – Southwark Playhouse Rehearsal Shots** – **Charlie Flint Photography**

This digital cannibalism renders the medium inherently compromised. ‘Because of that, AI is not capable of creating work that isn’t exploitative,’ she states. Her play takes aim at an older, entirely human instinct. ‘I was thinking of a more familiar form of exploitation: Hollywood, reality TV, and tabloids. Wherever human stories and experiences become products, exploitation is not far behind.’

A survival tool

Stripped of its speculative tech, Memoriam is deeply funny. Flaishon is careful, however, to distinguish the mechanics of the play’s comedy. ‘There is a difference between a situation the characters find funny… and something that is only funny for the audience,’ she explains. ‘I write about people who, overall, have very little filter. They say what’s on their mind with truth and wit; the humour comes from that.’

She also rejects the notion that the Holocaust and comedy are antithetical, pointing to the scathing cabaret written in Theresienstadt and the musical theatre performed in the Vilna Ghetto. ‘Humour as a way to make sense of trauma is such a deep part of Jewish culture – I couldn’t imagine this play without buckets of it.’

‘Memoriam’s tech was an exploration of this discomfort,’ Flaishon says. ‘How far can I take it? Can I make other people sit in this discomfort with me?’

– Nogia Flaishon

The production arrives at a critical juncture. The distortion of living memory is accelerating. ‘We learned that 60% of young people in the UK can’t differentiate between facts and misinformation about the Holocaust,’ Flaishon warns. It is a bleak statistic, compounded by a modern digital landscape where bots post ‘nasty comments on anything remotely Jewish’. It is this specific, historic illiteracy that prompted Tangram Theatre Company to heavily subsidise under-25 ticket pricing, a direct intervention to ensure the narrative reaches the most vulnerable demographic.

Asked if the UK theatre industry is finally ready to confront its own voyeuristic tendencies regarding Jewish trauma, Flaishon is pragmatically dismissive. ‘Does it matter if it isn’t?’ she asks.

The sustained interest in Memoriam suggests she has struck a nerve regardless. People are listening. And for Flaishon, the laughter they will hear in the dark is more than just a coping mechanism. It is a weapon. ‘Fascism doesn’t survive ridicule, so I see it as a mitzvah to make fun of them wherever and whenever possible.’

Featured Image: Noga Flashion