Did he know or didn't he? Was he aware of the Final Solution? That is the question that haunts any discussion of Albert Speer. But David Edgar's new play, based on Gitta Sereny's biography, only gets to grips with the big moral issues in the second half, after what often seems an impersonal recital of recorded events.
Edgar's purpose becomes clear only as the evening progresses. In the first half he presents us with Speer's version of himself. We see the young architect Speer plucked from relative obscurity in the 30s, becoming a friend of Hitler and preparing grandiose plans for the rebuilding of Berlin as the capital of a new world empire. But Speer's monumental vision is accompanied by an awareness, at the start of the war, of Germany's failure to arm and supply its troops.
In 1942 he becomes armaments minister and is responsible for the use of slave labour to increase production, but his conscience finally rebels against Hitler's scorched-earth policy as the war reaches its conclusion. Challenged on his involvement with the elimination of the Jews, he cries: "I should have known, I could have known, I didn't know."
Up to the interval I felt moodily dissatisfied. Where was the challenge to Speer's presumed ignorance and post-war reinvention of himself? But it comes in the vastly superior second half, in which Speer is constantly arraigned. Rudolf Wolters, his architect colleague and faithful ally, tells him at a literary party: "You flagellate yourself in hindsight to justify your sins at the time." And, in a scene where Speer gives a university lecture based on his memoirs, he is confronted by students who ask the questions that haunt Sereny's book: in particular, how Speer could not have been at a meeting in Posen in 1943 where Himmler spelled out extermination policies?
Even more than Sereny's book, Edgar's play leaves you with the impression that Speer was fully aware at the time of what was going on. Edgar also gives Hitler a powerful climactic speech in which he turns on his followers and asks why he was never taken literally when he talked of destruction and elimination, as he says to Speer, "You realised my vision." The final impression of Speer is of a man who lied to himself and others in order to live with his conscience.
As drama, it is full of slow-gathering power. And Trevor Nunn's panoramic production contains an overwhelming performance from Alex Jennings that combines Speer's ambition and guilt, and a no less fine one from Roger Allam as a Hitler who is Mephistopheles to Speer's Faust.
By the end of a long evening the play has also given us insight into the strange, truth-evading soul of the articulately evasive Albert Speer.
In rep. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
