Tense drama telling the true story of how an architect of the Holocaust secretly bargained with a Jew in the last days of World War II
For drama reimagining what went on behind the scenes during world-changing events, playwright Ben Brown is your go-to man. His 2010 play The Promise took its audience backstage in the lead up to the Balfour Declaration, he explored Churchill’s ‘darkest hours’ and reconstructed a 1987 meeting in Moscow between author Graham Greene and spy Kim Philby.
Brown returns to the 1940s, this time to Germany, to reveal an extraordinary, hitherto untold story from the last days of World War II. Himmler’s Finnish physiotherapist, Dr Felix Kersten, arranges a secret meeting between his client and Swedish Jew Norbert Masur, a representative of the World Jewish Congress, without the knowledge of the Führer. His source material includes the memoirs of Kersten, plus Masur’s account of the meeting, written as soon as he got back to Stockholm.
On Kersten’s estate, 70 kilometres from Berlin, the idyll is interrupted by distant explosions. An understandably uneasy Masur waits for the arrival of Hitler’s deputy to conduct clandestine negotiations aimed at freeing some of the remaining thousands facing death in concentration camps. Listening to Goebbels’ attempt a positive radio broadcast on Hitler’s last birthday (20 April 1945), provides a strange form of comic relief for the men, but once the impeccably turned-out Himmler arrives and the Jew and the Nazi are face to face, the tension is palpable. Himmler asks if this is Masur’s first time in Germany. “Do you have any family still here?” he asks positively chillingly. “No… Not anymore,” Masur responds. Then Himmler outlines his take on “the relations between our two peoples”, from Germany losing WWI – “stabbed in the back by the Jewish-influenced government” – to 1939 when, “egged on by the Jewish press", Britain and France declared war, so that by 1941, when faced with “the Jewish masses in the East … we had to conquer or perish.”
As Himmler’s version of events becomes ever more preposterously self-justifying, it’s clear he is trying to save his own skin, using prisoners as bargaining chips, in the face of imminent defeat and with Russians at the gates of Berlin. Considering the character's language and attitude, it's hard not to draw a parallel between the rhetoric over Ukraine coming out of Russia today.
Under Alan Strachan’s discreet direction and on designer Michael Pavelka’s evocative set, a room with large windows – the blinds down to protect those inside from prying eyes – the performances are uniformly powerful. Ben Caplan's cautious Masur is clearly and understandably on guard in the face of Richard Clothier’s aggressively self-justifying Himmler. Michael Lumsden’s Kersten is wonderfully hyperactive as he tries to broker any bargain that might save lives, while Kersten’s housekeeper Elisabeth Lube – a warmly convincing Audrey Palmer, is also eager to oblige in the hope of saving herself.
There’s a telling epilogue shared between Masur and Olivia Bernstone’s Jeanne Bommezjin, a prisoner freed as part of the bargain, where she describes how their terror at hearing of ‘transports’, usually meaning death for inmates, is turned to joy at the sight of the first Red Cross flag on a bus. Again, it’s hard not to draw a parallel with the longed-for evacuation of Mariupol. Brown may have written his powerful play well before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but it could hardly be more timely.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Mark Douet
The End of the Night runs until Saturday 28 May. 7.30pm, 3pm (Thu & Sat only). £18.50-£32.50, £16.50-£23.50 concs. Park Theatre, N4 3JP. parktheatre.co.uk