AFTERWORD
It was on the third day of rehearsal. Sitting round a huge table in the bowels of the National Theatre, actors about to play Hitler, Himmler, Eva Braun and the stage army of the Third Reich were debating the plausibility of Hitler’s Minister of Armaments not knowing about what was happening to Jews and others in the slave-labour and death camps of the Nazi empire. Suddenly, the argument escalated. Albert Speer was Hitler’s favourite. As his architect, he had been a vital part of the Nazi propaganda machine. As his armourer, he was responsible for millions of slave-workers kept in unspeakable conditions. He kept the war going for a year longer than it needed to, at the cost of untold suffering. Whatever he knew or didn’t know, did Speer have a case worth presenting? Was it worth us doing a play about this man at all?
This was not the first time this question had come up. It had been central to the discussions I had had with the play’s director Trevor Nunn during the development of the play. And for both of us there was a déjà vu: the same debate had raged around the production of a play I wrote about the rise of the National Front in 70s Britain (Destiny), which Nunn programmed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. By seeking to understand people with dreadful opinions, or people complicit in crimes resulting from those opinions, is the writer (or director or actor) inevitably tending to condone?
The first immediate, instinctive response in this case was that the play Albert Speer is based on a well-reviewed, highly regarded and massively successful biography by Gitta Sereny, whose moral credentials and dignity of purpose were questioned by no one. However, this argument falls apart when the material is transferred to the theatre. However passionate its author, a work of history has an essentially magisterial relationship with its readership. Like the French legal system, the medium invites sober consideration of the evidence, the balancing of arguments and the disinterested search for truth. Like a British courtroom, a play tends to the adversarial, demanding that the jury identify with one side. In this case, there is no sober summing up of the evidence, many of the prosecution witnesses are dead, and the accused is conducting his own defence. And however critical we may be of him and it, are we not – by the very act of presenting it – implying that he has a case? Or – even more insidiously – that his moral anguish can be set against the suffering for which he has been held responsible?
Further, we were aware that we were telling this story at a moment when the history of the second world war is a matter of acute and current political contest. As we rehearsed the play, another drama was being played out in the High Court of Justice. However unambiguous Mr Justice Gray’s finding may have been, the David Irving trial reminded everyone how much of the darkest events of the second world war are subject to interpretation, how deep is the controversy about the aims and history of the holocaust, and how much of our knowledge of it is based on essentially circumstantial evidence.
And we are exploring the case for and against a leading Nazi at a time when the supposed effects of writing are subject to unprecedented scrutiny. Not only are works of fiction cited as inspiring if not causing real life crimes (the ‘go thou and do likewise’ theory of literary influence) but works of non-fiction are called to account for the harm or even distress they might cause. Following the publication of her 1998 book about the Mary Bell case, Cries Unheard, Gitta Sereny herself was accused by the parents of Mary’s victims of ‘bringing up all the bad memories’. From this understandable concern with the feelings of people involved in tragedies, it has proved a short step to the argument advanced by a reader protesting against the serialisation of Gordon Burns’ book about Frederick and Rosemary West in The Guardian on the grounds of the ‘suffering, despair and pain involved in the subject matter’, not for the relatives of West’s victims, but for everyone. And both Marcus Garvey’s painting of and Diane Dubois’ play about the continuing iconic influence of Myra Hindley were condemned on the grounds that it was inappropriate to treat of her in art at all.
And yet – of course – if the subject of evil was removed from the dramatic canon most of the great tragedies would disappear from the repertoire. From Clytemnestra and Oedipus via Richard III, Macbeth and Othello to the gangsters, gunslingers and Godfathers of twentieth-century cinema, great drama has always been obsessed with killers, natural born and otherwise. If it was really true that the purpose of drama is to encourage its audiences to imitate the behaviour of its protagonists, then the medium has a great deal to answer for.
But, sadly, the opposite view – that the point of drama is precisely to discourage such behaviour by showing how it will inevitably get its come-uppance – doesn’t really wash. ‘Don’t do this at home’ is as misleading a description of what drama counsels us as ‘go thou and do likewise’. The awful truth – and it is awful, in both senses of the word – is that the response most great drama asks of us is neither ‘yes please’ nor ‘no thanks’ but ‘you too?’. Or, in the cold light of dawn, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.
When, understandably but sadly, the parents of Mary Bell’s victims wrote in The Sun that ‘Mary Bell is not worthy of consideration as a feeling, human being’, they were letting the rest of us off the hook. The notion that there is a thing called evil which separates the wicked off from the rest of us is a comforting illusion. The uncomfortable truth is that to understand does involve recognition and even empathy. It does require seeing the world through the eyes of the wicked person, and thus finding those impulses and resentments and fears within ourselves that could – we have painfully to admit – drive us to commit dreadful acts under different circumstances.
Drama is a test-bed on which we can test and confront our darkest impulses under laboratory conditions; where we can experience the desires without having to confront the consequences. As Peter Brook writes in The Empty Space, ‘in the theatre the slate is wiped clean all the time’. Drama enables us us to peer into the soul, not of the person who has driven his father out on to the heath, but the person who has wanted to.
But that’s only the first shock. The second is that we enjoy the view. As critics from Aristotle onwards have noted, we don’t just learn but take pleasure from seeing the representation of things that in real life we’d regard as disgusting or repellent. Indeed, the pleasure is the thing that allows us to confront these unbearable aspects of ourselves. This is why children like fictional forms whose familiarity is distanced by their location in the mythic past, the animal kingdom or outer space. And despite the wealth of all-too-human examples of monstrosity, adult audiences too demand villains from other worlds, different species and indeed beyond the grave.
Since the late nineteenth century, the assumption has been that the closer drama is to the lives of its audience, the more powerful and painful it will be. But the problem with looking in a mirror is that you see what the world sees. Look into a picture, and you may see what you have disguised.
Finally, because we see ourselves in him, the tragic villain commands our sympathy (indeed, the difference between the tragic and the melodramatic villain is quite precisely that). At the end of Albert Speer a dying man thinks he sees his past self approaching him through the mist but discovers that what is really inside him is not his own past but the terrible reality of a man he had once admired and loved. Looking at him confronting that truth I hope that the audience will look through that refraction back at itself. Albert Speer was subject to a Faustian temptation, fell for it, and spent the rest of his life creating a past with which he could deal. To be one of his many victims is – thank goodness – unimaginable for a well-fed first-world audience in the year 2000. To give in to personal ambition, to realise a moral and ideological error too late, and to spend the rest of your life making inadequate sense of that failure is all too recognisable.
As screenwriter Paul Schrader argued in defence of Taxi Driver, if writers stopped inventing criminals, ‘we would still have psychopaths, but we wouldn’t have art. We would still have Raskolnikovs but we wouldn’t have Crime and Punishment’. If Gitta Sereny hadn’t written her book about Albert Speer, his slave-workers would still have died, but we would be less able to understand why. For that reason alone, it seems to me worth taking the risk of putting his story on stage.
This is a revised version of an article published in The Observer, 30 April 2000