Conspiracy
★★★★★ Bureaucratic nightmare
Hill Street Theatre (Venue 41): Fri 16 – Sun 25 Aug 2024
Review by Thom Dibdin.
Conspiracy, a co-production between Edinburgh-based grassroots companies Strawmoddie and RFT, is a chilling and almost obscenely mundane account of the Wannsee Conference, held in a Berlin suburb in January 1942.
This is the infamous meeting at which 15 senior administrative leaders from the arms of the German state in Nazi Germany responsible for Jewish affairs and racial purity, met to thrash out the particularities of the policy that was to result in the Holocaust. It was a meeting of utmost secrecy, whose participants were forbidden from keeping their notes and only one written minute survived.
David Taylor, Jonathan Whiteside and Matthew Jebb. Pic: Robin Mair
Loring Mandel’s play, based on the script for his HBO movie of the same name, plays out at 90 minutes. It is not verbatim, but is a dramatised real-time account of the meeting itself, held in the snow-bound luxury of a Wannsee villa.
The Strawmoddie/RFT production, something of a remount of the production which ran for two nights only in 2018, plays straight to that idea, set in the room where the meeting took place. A head table with two tables facing each other. There is a buffet and drinks for the participants.
ebbs and flows
The shock of the whole play is just how banal the meeting is. Subject matter apart, its ebbs and flows, the arguments between factions, the CEO arriving late to impress, the mother-hen secretary figure keeping everything in order, the department head with a plan of their own and the underling who desperately wants to get in with their superiors, are all familiar from a thousand meetings held every day in organisations across the world.
Mandel’s script succeeds by using that ebb and flow to its own advantage. He engineers natural breaks, allows conversations to bubble up, bringing fragments of dialogue to the fore and uses the latest office gossip as a background to the whole piece.
Frank Skelly, Joseph Cathal, Nick Thorne (speaking), Tamas Fazakas, Chris Allan and Alistair Lawless. Pic: Robin Mair
It is all made beautifully clear under Caitlin Carter’s direction, who uses the lull before the meeting starts to establish character. David Taylor as Lt. Colonel Adolf Eichmann fussily sets out the tables, bosses his aide around (Sinclair Davies who glides in and out of the room) and welcomes the attendees who, to a man, are concerned as to the arrival of the chair, General Reinhard Heydrich.
Character hints are given in the way they Sieg Heil and work the room: SS officers Heinrich Müller (Matthew Jebb), Otto Hofmann (Ben Blow) Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (Tamas Fazakas) and Rudolf Lange (Joseph Cathal), all rather more comfortable in their positions, pour each other drinks and argue over the quality of the vintage wines available.
existential threats
Frank Skelly’s Secretary of State, Erich Neumann, hawks his Four Year Plan around to anyone who will listen (none do); Alan Sunter’s Under Secretary of State, Martin Luther, ingratiates himself with anyone he recognises as having a position of power, and gets nowhere.
The gossip concerns Germany’s failings on the Eastern front, and where responsibility might lie, the banter is about racial purity. And the later the break-out moments allow for existential threats by Heydrich towards those who were not agreeing with his line.
Sinclair Davies, Chris Pearson, Ben Blow, Timothy Bond, Ray Fortune. Pic: Robin Mair
But most chilling of all is how much of a bureaucratic argument the decision making process is.
When Jonathan Whiteside, in a powerful turn as Heydrich, moves on from the statistics of the Jewish populations of Germany and the occupied territories, to outline new definitions of racial purity, Timothy Bond as Secretary of State Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart is niggling about the Nuremberg laws which already exist to set such things out; Alistair Lawless’s Roland Freisler arguing about the legal framework for the current policy.
When Stuckart is shouted down by Chris Allan’s beer-swilling Gerhard Klopfer, the representative of the Nazi party, it allows the ideals of either faction to be drawn out. The Nazi ideologue who sees Jews as an inferior sub-species, and the legal bureaucrat who see them as clever, conniving and secretive. Both, however, called for extermination.
spooked
Such extermination had already started, and several of the conference attendees were from occupied states where pogroms had taken place. Cathal puts in a particularly effective performance as Lange describes the mass shooting of Jews in Latvia. How some survived and were buried alive, in a seething pit of the not-yet dead. Although visibly shaken, his stated concern was not human sympathy but that his soldiers were spooked.
Joseph Cathal with Frank Skelly, Nick Thorne, Tamas Fazakas and Chris Allan. Pic: Robin Mair
Not everyone in the room was in favour of total extermination. Frank Skelly gives the constantly sidelined Secretary of State Erich Neumann a hurt and desperate air, as he points out that is four year plan relies on a continuing supply of Jewish slave labour – the very existence of which was, of course, another way of killing Jews.
Then there are those who are completely out of the loop. Chris Pearson is a most effective Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, permanent secretary to the Reich Chancellery, constantly trying to interject and ultimately presenting the most telling of reasons against total annihilation of all Jews – the very reason that Jews were othered in the first place; when you have set up a situation of “us” and “them” how to continue when you have no “them” to unify against?
Beyond the arguments against the SS’s policy from bureaucrats and pen pushers, the representatives of ministries for the occupied territories are quick to complain of the current policy of sending Jews East. Dr. Josef Bühler (Nick Thorne), Georg Leibbrandt (Ray Fortune) and Alfred Meyer (Martin Molloy) voice their complaints about the insanitary ghettoes they are having to endure.
bureaucratic objections
Whiteside makes Heydrich’s revelation of just how far the plans for the “final solution of the Jewish problem” had already proceeded, fascinating in its delivery.
First introducing the notions of carbon monoxide gas and mobile killing chambers, as more bureaucratic objections are raised, finally revealing the existing plans for Auschwitz with its industrial-scale killing plants where Jews would be transported East, night and day, to be penned, gassed and incinerated.
Here, as the company beat the tables in approval, is near universal acclaim amidst universal deniability.
Nick Thorne, Tamas Fazakas, Chris Allan and Alistair Lawless. Pic: Robin Mair.
There is little to like here; a lot to appreciate. Cigarette handling, so often an issue, is universally correct. Characters are created in the depths of the room by their reactions to the arguments. The costumes from Sophie Guise (the original 2018 production), Caitlin Carter and Grace Gilbert feel correct. The whole 90 minutes passes horrifyingly fast, thanks to Carter’s eloquent direction.
But what is also clear is just how easy it is to slip from the othering used by populist regimes around the contemporary world – including up until a few months ago our own – into to dehumanising the other. And from dehumanising, then state killing is but a succession of small bureaucratic steps away.
Conspiracy is, sadly, a very necessary piece of theatre: a warning to beware those in power who choose to ignore history, thus condemning us to repeat it.
Running time: One hour and 30 minutes (no interval)
Hill Street Theatre (Alba Theatre), 19 Hill St, EH2 3JP (Venue 41)
Friday 16 – Sunday 25 August 2024
Daily: 8.15 pm
Details and tickets at: Book here
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LHS: Joseph Cathal, Nick Thorne, Tamas Fazakas, Chris Allan and Alistair Lawless; centre: David Taylor, Jonathan Whiteside and Matthew Jebb, standing: Sinclair Davies; RHS: Chris Pearson, Ben Blow, Timothy Bond, Ray Fortune and Martin Molloy. Pic: Robin Mair
ENDS
