NIUSIA: A Strangely Warm Reckoning With Inherited Memory

How do you honour the legacy of a woman you hardly knew, and didn’t really like? NIUSIA turns that uneasy inheritance into an intimate, emotionally restless one-woman excavation of identity, remembrance and the family stories we pass on.

Created by and starring Beth Paterson, a Naarm/Melbourne based theatremaker and singer, the part memoir, part reconstruction, and part emotional investigation work follows Paterson as she pieces together the life of her grandmother Niusia—a Holocaust survivor remembered less as a figure of resilience than as a difficult deeply unyielding presence.

Niuisa is a woman whose legacy is felt as much in silence and absence as in anything she explicitly left behind.

Difficult, often unkind, and the kind of person who stopped speaking to her own daughter over a loan with interest attached, Paterson remembers her as a bitch and doesn’t flinch saying so.

The show starts where that feeling starts, with a teenager who just didn’t want to go to grandma’s, and by the time the books are flying across the stage you understand exactly how it grew.

The narrative spools back steadily through Niusia’s Melbourne businesses built singlehandedly after immigration, then further to Warsaw in 1922, ambitions to become a doctor, Auschwitz, and the medical work she was forced to perform under Josef Mengele. By the time those facts land, Paterson’s earlier irritation looks like something else entirely.

Paterson threads together her own memories with her mother’s voice, which plays throughout in warm, unhurried voiceover recordings that Beth interacts with in real time. It’s a lovely framing device, steady and intimate without overstaying its welcome. Her mother still carries a tenderness toward Niusia that Beth is only beginning to locate in herself, and that gap between the two women is where the show quietly lives.

It is less institutional religion than fractured continuity, what Paterson herself frames as a “Jew-ish” identity shaped by distance, rediscovery and partial understanding.

Paterson is a compelling presence and her Niusia impression is the best thing she does, thick-accented and specific, landing the character through rhythm more than imitation. Her delivery shifts between childlike recall and enthusiastic schoolteacher, and you feel her move through rage and confusion toward something closer to acceptance as Niusia slowly comes into focus.

That said, when the show allows itself stillness, it finds a more confident register, particularly in one quietly arresting recollection of Niusia’s experience during the Holocaust, including references to her time under Joseph Mengele, where the performance cuts through its own levity with stark, unadorned force.

The darker jokes don’t always earn their place, landing on top of the material rather than coming out of it. The show keeps reaching for emotional closure then stepping sideways, which blurs its own momentum in a tight sixty minutes. In a room of six people shared laughter is a fragile thing, and some of it felt obligatory. The solemnness, when it arrived, was unanimous.

Niusia’s story deserves to be told and Paterson tells it with real heart. The execution doesn’t always match the material, but the material is extraordinary.

NIUISA is playing till 11 April at Qtopia Sydney.