American writer Donald Freed is not the first dramatist to use Adolph Eichmann as a springboard for moral debate. But, where Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth focused on the Nazi war criminal's public trial, Freed sets up a fictive encounter in Jerusalem in 1960 between Eichmann and a female Israeli psychologist. The result, until the climax, is a gripping play about the growing kinship between the captive and his questioner.
What emerges strongly is the contrast between Eichmann's conventional background and the monstrosity of his actions. We learn that he was a church-goer and gas salesman before joining the SS and being promoted to what was chillingly called the "Jews Department". In 1942, he organised the notorious Wannsee conference that authorised the Final Solution. Questioned by Dr Baum about his moral responsibility, Eichmann offers any number of slippery defences: that he was only a cog in the machine, that he helped individual Jews, that he was a victim of historical fate.
All this makes compelling viewing. But the big question is raised by Baum at the end of the first half, when she enters a plea for Eichmann to be allowed to live as a permanent witness to the Holocaust. Like George Steiner in his novella about a captured Hitler, Freed is asking what punishment can possibly be commensurate with unimaginable crimes. I wish Freed had pursued that issue. But, although the second half is full of fascinating revelations - such as that Eichmann virtually ensured his own capture in Buenos Aires - it lurches towards a contrived climax, in which Baum, in an abortive attempt to uncover Eichmann's residual humanity, turns herself into his tormentor.
Even if Freed ultimately overplays the tortuous twinship of the guilt-ridden survivor and the instrument of evil, his play is never less than exciting. Michael Vale's production also contains a massive performance - possibly a little too massive for the intimate confines of the Mercury studio - from Gerard Murphy as the twisting, evasive, arrogant Eichmann and a delicately shaded one from Holly de Jong as his haunted questioner. Freed's moral questioning and dark vision of a world in which we are all potential monsters "who've been called human beings too soon" is certainly disturbing.
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