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Decent drama labours under 1940s hangover
BERLIN HANOVER EXPRESS
Hampstead Theatre
HANNAH Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil”. She argued that the architects of the Holocaust were not rabid anti-semites, but bureaucrats obeying orders. True, Nazi executioners may have been the ones with bloody hands, but the number-crunchers and pen-pushers of wartime Germany were to a greater or lesser extent also culpable.
Among the indirect accomplices in Nazi crimes, Ian Kennedy Martin’s drama reminds us, were Irishmen.
Officially neutral in the war, Ireland had a consulate in Berlin – a spruce, seemingly innocuous office.
The main characters in this play, diplomats Mallin (Sean Campion) and O’Kane (Owen McDonnell), could hardly be more different. Mallin is a humourless civil servant, while O’Kane is a freewheeling joker and the stereotype of the loquacious Irishman. They receive regular visits from Kollvitz, an official from an obscure department of the Reich who specialises in uncovering communists and other “traitors”.
Unbeknownst to the diplomats, Christe, the consulate’s German cook, is Jewish, and Kollvitz’s discovery of this instigates minor soul searching. Should Mallin and O’Kane take a stand, or follow diplomatic protocol that prohibits meddling in Germany’s internal affairs?
As bombs resound in the streets and corpses burn in what Kollvitz euphemistically calls “industrial complexes,” O’Kane waxes indignant about the horrors of Nazism – but chickens out of doing anything heroic. Mallin, for his part, speaks high-mindedly of Irish neutrality while making accommodations with Hitler’s regime – none of which is surprising in a state where those who hid Jews were also killed.
Berlin Hanover Express treads well-beaten paths that might have been more usefully explored without recourse to such an extreme reference point as the Holocaust.
It is a gripping drama that makes its point well, but it says little that has not been said many times already.
Until April 4
020 7722 9301 |
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