There is an obvious difficulty to dramatising the subject of the Nazis’ so-called “euthanasia programme”: how to avoid a note of generalised retrospective outrage. Stephen Unwin, a practised director making his impressive debut as a playwright, does this in two ways: by focusing specifically on the deaths of disabled children and by creating a passionate moral debate between two eloquent antagonists.
The time is 1941, and the place a clinic not far from Cologne. Victor, the paediatrician who created the clinic in peacetime to help sick children, is now forced to use it to dispatch severely disabled people to their deaths. His own growing qualms about the process are brutally countered by a young SS officer, Eric, who has been installed as his deputy.
In the course of the action, the ailing Victor is forced to defend himself against two visitors. The first is a mother anxious about the fate of her son; the second is Bishop von Galen who, as in life, challenges both the practice and the philosophy of the extermination of the supposedly unproductive.
Unwin creates such a strong situation, you feel it doesn’t need extra garnishing. It strikes me as gratuitous to show Eric to be a sexual predator as well as a loyal Hitlerite and to endow the inquisitive mother, Elizabetta, with a prophetic vision of a bomb-flattened Cologne. But what makes the play engrossing is Unwin’s ability to explore both internal doubt and external conflict.
Victor is plausibly presented as a former idealist all too aware of his impossible predicament: he even knowingly quotes Brecht by responding to his Catholic maid’s assertion that morals come first by asking: “And food later?” The real meat of the play lies in his encounter with Bishop von Galen, whose fierce religious absolutism prompts Victor to defend Nazi policy on rational, economic grounds. What might have been a one-sided contest turns into a genuine debate confirming the writer Eric Bentley’s point that nothing is more dramatic than two articulate characters engaged in a battle of words. One might even call the play Shavian were it not that Shaw, in his preface to On the Rocks, notoriously offered an apologia for eugenics.
What Unwin has, in fact, written is a good, traditional play that draws our attention to a less familiar aspect of Nazi ruthlessness without lapsing into propaganda. Unwin’s production is also extremely well cast. Colin Tierney as Victor suggests a decent man wracked by pain and his own powerlessness in the face of official diktats.
David Yelland as the bishop, who went on to attack Nazi policy from his Münster pulpit, admirably embodies the church at its most militant. There is strong support from Rebecca Johnson as Victor’s devout housemaid and from Lucy Speed as a working-class mother, while Edward Franklin does all he can to bring a touch of light and shade to the ultra-orthodox Nazi.
Unwin’s achievement, however, is to have proved that the well-made play – however unfashionable – can still be a vehicle for information and argument.
• At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 3 June. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
