The Last Picture review – talking dog leads a journey from horror to hope

Can we ever truly learn from history? That question hangs over Catherine Dyson’s The Last Picture, first shared in a rehearsed reading at York Theatre Royal as part of the RSC’s 37 Plays initiative in 2023 and now receiving a full production. The play moves constantly between past and present, testing the empathic capacities and limits of theatre.

Addressed in the second person, it casts us both as a theatre audience and as a class of year 9 students on a school trip to an exhibition about the Holocaust. Not a single image is shown; as the unseen photographs are described the drama flings us into the scenes they capture, shifting perspective between those being led to their deaths and the neighbours who looked the other way.

Robin Simpson is our guide throughout, radiating a comforting canine energy as Sam, the students’ emotional support dog, gently leading us through the exhibition and pausing to check how we’re feeling.

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