HOW can someone square the deaths of 1.2 million men, women and

children against their conscience? Through hate, emotional numbness, or

an obstinate focus on trivial details which deny the horror any potency,

which refuse to allow death to seep through obsessive statistics about

discipline, order and cleanliness?

Robert David MacDonald's adaptation of Into That Darkness, Gitta

Sereny's account of her interviews with Franz Stangl, the Austrian

commandant at the infamous Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka in

Poland, is a rigorous, probing exploration of man's ability to deny his

own humanity, presenting a portrait of a man whose most monstrous

characteristic is his very ordinariness.

The man who coolly oversaw wholescale massacre casually protesting

that he wore white riding gear in the midst of the carnage not out of

sadistic vanity but because it was so hot, is also a family man fiercely

passionate about his wife and daughters and one who tearfully recalls a

childhood Christmas, of racing out into the snow in her new slippers and

the subsequent beating at the hands of a harsh father.

Originally performed by the Citizens' Theatre Company last April, the

play was reprised for a one-off reading as part of a weekend conference

on drama and performance organised by Glasgow University's Department of

Theatre Studies.

Brendan Hooper, currently performing in The Ebb Tide replaces Henry

Ian Cusick as the male chorus but otherwise the original cast again take

up their roles; Joanna Tope, a study in denial and protested innocence

as Stangl's wife, Roberta Taylor deadly assured and composed as Stangl's

inquisitor, Sereny, and MacDonald himself chillingly realising the

complexities of the commandant who resists the demands made on his

conscience.