BWW Reviews: DEFYING HITLER, Unicorn Theatre, 11 January 2012

Though they later swam in a sea of blood, the Nazis of Germany were those rarest of revolutionaries -  elected officials. Not that their contempt for democracy was diminished by their coming to power in Germany's elections of 1932 and 1933. How these crazy thugs came to wield unchallengeable and unchallenged power over a sophisticated, educated people like the Germans of the 1930s, is the subject of Defying Hitler, Rupert Wickham's adaptation for Theatre Unlimited of Sebastian Haffner's memoir.

As portrayed by Russell Bright, wracked by earnest guilt and repressed anger, Haffner looks back on his youth and the political turmoil in Berlin. As a schoolboy, he squinted to read the news of World War One battles on the wall of the Post Office; as a teenager, he travelled to the early-morning market with his family to spend millions of marks before hyperinflation made them worthless later that same day; as a young man, he heard brutal abuse flung around by children within earshot of his Jewish girlfriend; and as a young lawyer, he saw his fellow lawyers beaten for being Jewish and his father humiliated for being retired on a State pension. In the play's key scene, the SA arrive in the courthouse where Haffner worked and, on being asked if he was an Aryan, he blurted out, "Yes". In that answer and at the price of a lifetime of shame, he bought enough time to escape to England where he worked as a journalist and writer, the manuscript for Defying Hitler only discovered after his death.

Aimed at teenagers, this one-man performance (too intimate and personal to be completely comfortable on the larger of The Unicorn's two stages) reveals how the the tiny, coerced (and therefore somewhat understandable) decisions of ordinary men and women fed the engine of Nazi psychosis that led to the destruction of the nation in whose name they purported to act and the Holocaust and genocides of industrialised evil. Though saying nothing really new, Defying Hitler underlines how education, a sense of morality and comfortable wealth are of no use unless evil is confronted and repulsed. 'Twas ever thus and ever will be.

Defying Hitler is at The Unicorn Theatre until 13 January and on tour with Stalin's Favourite at The Unicorn 18-20 January.