Writer Ben Brown has found something of a niche in creating solid, efficient, and informative dramatic reconstructions of real-life historical encounters.
5 May 2022
Brown’s enjoyable 2021 work, ‘A Splinter of Ice’ imagined what took place in a real-life 1987 encounter between novelist Graham Greene and spy, Kim Philby. A decade or so earlier he wrote ‘Three Days in May’, which dramatized 1940 discussions between Churchill and his war cabinet, and the rather better ‘The Promise’ which dealt with reimagined political and personal events underpinning the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
The Park Theatre’s ‘The End of The Night’, solidly directed by Brown’s go-to choice of artistic collaborator Alan Strachan, is another strong if slightly pedestrian historical reinvention in the same vein.
It is April 1945. SS Leader Heinrich Himmler, played with dark, delusional, self-obsession in an excellent performance by Richard Clothier, decides on an impossible attempt to create common cause between a tottering Germany and the Allies. His aim is the destruction of bolshevism and to save his own skin in the process.
With this in mind, Himmler, fresh from grim birthday party with Hitler, makes his way to an encounter set up by his personal physiotherapist Dr Felix Kersten at his estate north of Berlin. There he is to meet with Norbert Masur, a representative of the World Jewish Congress. The SS leader’s apparent purpose is to bury the hatchet between Germany and the Jews, put the slaughter of the concentration camps behind them, and move on.
Masur’s motivation in cooperating with Himmler’s unhinged proposal is to get as many of the remaining Jews as he can out of concentration camps to the safety of neutral Sweden. Kersten wants his reputation to survive the end of the war. But how can both men persuade the architect of the Holocaust to release the camp inmates he has now come to regard as his hostages?
The historical record suggests over 7000 women were saved from death at Ravensbrück concentration camp as a result of the meeting, so whatever the real-life Masur and Kersten did certainly had an impact.
In the dramatization we see Kersten, in a well-considered and convincing performance by Michael Lumsden, cajoling, coaxing, and literally massaging the pain-wracked Himmler into agreement. The role of Masur, played by Ben Caplan, requires him to maintain stoic composure as he listens to the whining justification of a mass-murderer.
The play’s sense of dramatic tension is squeezed a little by some fairly clunky exposition at the outset of the first act, and throughout the second – does the drama really demand a history lesson from Himmler recounting the Nazi’s historical justification for antisemitism?
As theatre ‘The End of The Night’ is always engaging and occasionally compelling. As an historical recounting of what might have taken place it is also both credible and though-provoking.
Worth a trip.
Ben Brown – Writer
Alan Strachan – Director
Tom Brain – Assistant Director
Cast
Olivia Bernstone JEANNE BOMMEZJIN
Ben Caplan NORBERT MASUR
Richard Clothier HEINRICH HIMMLER
Michael Lumsden FELIX KERSTEN
Audrey Palmer ELISABETH LUBE
Full Disclosure: I paid full box-office price for the ticket.
