Review: Taking Sides and Collaboration

You can wait years for a serious drama to arrive in the West End (at least one that is not just an excuse for a screen star to notch up some stage credibility), then two come along at once.

These absorbing, meaty morality plays by Ronald Harwood were first paired at Chichester. Each examines the reputation of a 20th-century giant of German culture. In Taking Sides (written in 1995), it is the reputation of conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler; in Collaboration (Harwood’s latest play), it is Richard Strauss’s. And the moral question posed by each of these cross-cast works, directed by Philip Franks, is why did these great artists — both played by Michael Pennington — choose to stay in Germany under Hitler?

For David Horovitch’s American Major Arnold, whose job in post-war Berlin is to root out Nazis, the answer is simple — Furtwangler was a Nazi. At least that is Arnold’s working assumption as he cross-examines the imperious maestro.

Furtwangler’s defence is that politics and music should never mix and that his first duty was to the culture of the country he loved — a defence which cuts no ice with Arnold. He was at Belsen two days after the camp’s liberation. The victims populate his nightmares.
Taking Sides takes place entirely within Arnold’s office in Berlin’s American Zone. This is where he and his newly arrived fellow inquisitor, the Jewish German-born American Lieutenant Wills (Martin Hutson), conduct their interviews while the timid Emmi Straube (Sophie Roberts), the daughter of a dead German officer who conspired to kill Hitler, records the proceedings.

It is a struggle between high culture and philistinism; Arnold’s low-brow erstwhile insurance claim assessor verses the greatest conductor in the world. Yet crucially it is Arnold who delivers the play’s conscience and its lessons — that culture is no guarantee of civilised behaviour; that being the most cultured country in the world did not stop Germany from hatching the Final Solution; and, as the Major furiously puts it to Lieutenant Wills, culture did not save his parents from being murdered.

It is worth remembering that Harwood sets his play in 1946, before it was known that the Nazis played Mozart to their victims as they were herded into the gas chambers — a fact that Arnold would have happily deployed to undermine Furtwangler’s self-appointed role as Germany’s guardian of music.

Pennington’s Furtwangler exudes all the arrogance of a man used to being treated with unquestioning devotion. “A conductor is a dictator who gives certainty and order,” says the obsequious second fiddle of Furtwangler’s orchestra.

In Collaboration the polite, mutually respectful double act of German composer Richard Strauss and Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig (also played by Horovitch) inevitably provides fewer sparks. After all, one is not attempting to establish the other’s guilt.

And whereas for Collaboration Pennington moves from the austere Furtwangler to the absent-minded, avuncular Strauss, Horovitch travels the other way. His Major Arnold is a belching iconoclast, his Zweig a ramrod-stiff, heel-clicking traditionalist.

Strauss’s antisemitism is depicted as a low-level brand of bigotry. A casual comment about his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice — a “Jewess… but we are very fond of her” — is about as racist as he gets. And even this lazy insult is overwhelmed by his love and loyalty to his increasingly persecuted Jewish librettist.

It is a quietly intriguing relationship but it is not until Hutson appears as Germany’s culture Minister Hans Hinkel that the play delivers a charge that electrifies the stage.

It arrives in the scene during which the play’s two formidable forces clash — on the one hand, rising fascism embodied by Hinkel, and on the other, the indomitable matriarch, represented by Strauss’s formidable wife Pauline (a terrific Isla Blair). When even she is bullied into submission by Hutson’s hideous Hinkel (this, by the way, is the stand-out performance of both productions, for which Hutson accompanies every veiled and explicit threat with a chilling smile), you know the world is in trouble.

In the West End especially, this is rare and enriching stuff. (www.duchesstheatre.co.uk)