In a world where the memory of the Holocaust is in danger of fading, whether from denial or the passage of time, a play on the investigation into a collection of photographs of Auschwitz feels not only timely, but necessary.

Photographs themselves, ‘both objective record and personal testimony’ as Susan Sontag once wrote, are under threat as evidence of atrocity in an age where images can be distorted, manipulated and submerged in a swirl or information and misinformation.

Here there are Blueberries, co-written by Amanda Gronich and Moisés Kaufman, (himself the descendant of a Holocaust survivor), attempts to utilise the power of theatre to both sustain remembrance of the Holocaust and interrogate the success of photographs as preservers of truth.

What gives the play its dramatic edge, is that this is the story of the photographs of the perpetrators of Auschwitz, not the victims.

From the off, it is clear that the play will take an intellectual approach. A camera is placed centre stage on a pedestal before the curtains even open, and when they do, the audience is given a lecture on the Leica camera, ‘the camera of modern times’, which was adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s to jovially record their personal lives away from the camps, and ended up turning them into ‘history’s most willing recorders.’

The scene then quickly shifts to the research department of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where archivist Rebecca Erbelding (played by Philippine Velge) and her colleagues tell us the real story of the anonymous donation of 116 photographs of Auschwitz by an American citizen in 2007, who had salvaged the album as an army officer in Frankfurt immediately after the Second World War.

Wartime photographs of Auschwitz are rare, we are told, and rarer still are photographs of the commandants and other Nazi perpetrators. What follows is the depiction of the investigation of the cause and author of this collection, and the consequences once the discovery was made public.

Though the tension takes a while to take effect, the performances of the research team as they unravel the historical details of the photographs, especially that of Erbelding and the head of the museum’s collection Judy Cohen (Geraldine Alexander), are immediately convincing.

It must be a challenge to reflect the curiosity and rigor of a researcher and make the role dramatically engaging. Without this quality the play would lose some of its historical weight.

The photographs play the central role, however. They are haunting in their depiction of the frivolity of the perpetrators as they socialise, sing and laugh among the horrors of the camp, and relax in Solahütte, a holiday retreat for the SS only 30km away: this is ‘The world the Nazis envisioned.’

The photographs light up on the stage, then disappear, then reappear as the researchers interact with and scrutinise them, relaying their findings, and their moral reflections, to the audience in a way that is compelling, but at times a little overbearing. I wish we had more space to pause and linger with the photographs by ourselves.

Just as the play begins to veer into becoming too academic, there are moments of intense transgenerational drama, as members of the public who have spotted their relatives come forward and wrestle with their trauma.

Most poignant of these moments is the monologue of Rainer Höss (Arthur Wilson), grandson of an Auschwitz commandant, who abandoned his family after learning of their crimes and turned his trauma into violence. His descriptions of senselessly beating people (‘I thrashed him in the worst way’, ‘I really broke him’) capture how the horror of the Holocaust has the potential to transmit through the descendants of the perpetrators.

There are other dramatic moments that are fleeting: the moral dilemma of deciding whether to publicise and therefore ‘elevate’ the Nazis in a museum for victims, or the obsession, possibly intimate, of Erbelding with the main historical villain and collector of the album, Karl Höcker.

But where the play triumphs is in the drama between the past and the present, when the researchers shift into the perpetrators, when they enact the photographs they are analysing – a particularly destabilising moment comes when they sing in tandem with the photograph of the Nazis singing, this after they had named the photograph the ‘chorus of criminals.’ It is a fine line between us and the perpetrators, between us and complicity. It is a chilling realisation to face.

The final shapeshifting occurs at the close of the play, when Erbelding becomes Lili Jacob, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, and discoverer of another adjacent album of the victims of the camp. Now it is the time for testimony, and Jacob sits alone and tormented as she retells her share of the history against the backdrop of photos of her family at Auschwitz: ‘I share it with you now. Because time passes on.’

Before the walls shut over the photographs to the sound of grinding concrete.