Taken at Midnight review – gripping tale of Jewish lawyer who crossed Hitler

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/05/taken-at-midnight-review-hitler

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One of the Minerva’s recent highlights was a revival of Bertolt Brecht’s allegorical fable about Hitler’s ascent to power, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Now the director of that performance, Jonathan Church, brings us a very different play about Germany in the 1930s: a sober, gripping drama by Mark Hayhurst about precisely what happened to those who did indeed treat Hitler’s rise as resistible. Hayhurst wrote a TV play, The Man Who Crossed Hitler, and a documentary, Hans Litten vs Adolf Hitler: To Stop a Tyrant, about the extraordinary story of a young Jewish lawyer who subpoenaed Hitler to appear as a witness in a criminal trial in 1931 and who, in the process, called him “a cross between Baron Münchhausen and Attila the Hun”.

Although Hayhurst’s play shows how Litten was taken into “protective custody” in 1933 and sent to Sonnenburg concentration camp, it focuses on the attempts by Litten’s mother, Irmgard, to confront the Gestapo and rescue her son from what seemed his inevitable fate. Taken at Midnight could easily become a simple story of a heroic mother battling to save her incarcerated son, but Hayhurst has the intelligence to highlight the complexity of the characters, without diminishing the brutality of the Nazi regime from its beginnings.

In taking on the Gestapo, Irmgard resolves to be both “patient and objectionable”. There are also hints that Hans, while suffering unspeakable cruelties, was not without a touch of lawyerly showmanship in his cross-examination of Hitler. By introducing a British diplomat who takes up the Litten case but argues that too open a show of aggression would be counterproductive, Hayhurst reminds us of the establishment’s reluctance to acknowledge the reality of Nazi Germany. In 1933, a Times leader claimed “all the world is asking the question – and asking it for the most part sympathetically – whether the street orator [Hitler] will become an efficient ruler.”

What Hayhurst’s play really shows is the courage it took for any German to stand up to the Nazis. In this he is aided by a superb performance by Penelope Wilton as Irmgard. Wilton increasingly reminds me of the great Peggy Ashcroft in her ability to convey moral authority without any ostentatious display of acting technique. There is something quietly implacable about Wilton in her confrontations with the Gestapo chief, Dr Conrad. Yet she also subtly hints at Irmgard’s maternal anguish by a slight vocal quaver on her first mention of the word Sonnenburg. Wilton beautifully highlights the conflict between resistance to tyranny and a mother’s determination to save her son when she tells Hans that “the time for bravery is over.”

Church’s production is strongly cast all round. Martin Hutson conveys all of Hans Litten’s uncompromising defiance, John Light gradually allows us to see the ideological rigidity that underlies Dr Conrad’s smoothly polite surface and there is fine support, among Litten’s fellow-captives, from Mike Grady as a truculent newspaper editor and Pip Donaghy as a free-speaking anarchist who constantly refers to Hitler as “the Austrian transvestite”. The only false touch comes when, during the incarceration scenes, the prisoners reconstruct Hitler’s courtroom cross-examination and Hans pulls a false moustache out of his pocket. Much as we want to know what was said during the trial, it seems improbable that Hans would come equipped with vital props. That aside, this is an informative and deeply engrossing play about the high price paid for resisting tyranny.

• Until 1 November. Box office: 01243 781312. Venue: Minerva, Chicester.