Victor Klemperer was a German Jew. Unlike many of his fellow Jews during Nazi rule he had two pieces of good fortune.
The first was that he was married to Eva, a non-Jew, which meant that he was always at the end of lists for transportation to the concentration camps - the Nazis calculated that killing the partners of non-Jews, who after all would have other non-Jewish relatives, might not be a popular move.
Klemperer's other bit of good fortune was that when he was finally scheduled for transportation to one of the death camps in February 1945, the Allies firebombed Dresden, virtually razing it to the ground. All Gestapo records were destroyed and Klemperer became a refugee along with all the other survivors.
Our good fortune is that the detailed secret diaries that Klemperer, a former university professor who had been dismissed from his job in 1935, kept between 1935 and 1945 provide a remarkable picture of everyday life in the Third Reich.
Klemperer was determined to bear witness to what was happening in Germany even though he knew that his diaries would be a death sentence if they were found.
They are a fascinating portrait of ordinary people living their lives during extraordinary times, and the struggle to maintain some kind of normality in a world where, as Klemperer observed, "it is not only the word impossible that has gone out of circulation, unimaginable also has no validity any more."
In this world social visits to friends rubbed shoulders with the suicides of those selected for transportation as well as tea and cakes with Gestapo thugs calling round to administer beatings. Klemperer wrote it down as it was: the hysterics as much as the heroics, the selfish acts of survival, as well as the small kindnesses and huge risks taken for others.
He even observed himself with wry detachment. After the suicide of a woman in his house he noted gleefully: " We shall inherit potatoes."
There is no doubt that Klemperer's voice should be heard and in this one-man show George Bartenieff makes it heard quite beautifully in a performance of quiet integrity.
But the adaptation and staging do so little to make this a theatrical rather than a literary or documentary event that you never feel that you are getting much more than you could get from reading the diaries in book form.
· Until Feb 10. Box office: 020 7472 5800
