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.
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