Taken at Midnight

by Mark Hayhurst

seen at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 12 February 2015

This play, transferred to London from Chichester, concerns the attempts of Irmgard Litten (Penelope Wilton) to obtain the release of her lawyer son Hans (Martin Hutson) from 'protective custody' - that is, effective imprisonment - in various German concentration camps from 1933 until his suicide in Dachau in 1937. Hans Litten had earlier (in 1931) issued a sub-poena to Adolf Hitler to appear in a trial of four Brownshirts (members of the SA), a humiliation not forgotten when the Nazis came to power. (The play is based on Irmgard Litten's own memoirs.)

The play follows Irmgard's confrontations with the SS bureaucracy, embodied in the deceptive charm of Dr Conrad (John Light), interspersed with her own ruminations on the events, and with various scenes of Hans's imprisonment, which are themselves often explorations of the nature of what is happening to Germany. This is due to the presence in his first confinement of an irrepressible anarchist Erich Mühsam (Pip Donaghy) and the left wing Carl von Ossietsky (Mike Grady); the discussions of the three men provide the political and philosophical background (and some perhaps surprising comic relief considering their dire situation), while Wilton's soliloquies comment movingly on the more personal questions of maternal instinct and humane revulsion at what is happening around her.

Matters are complicated by the fact that Hans's father Fritz (Allan Corduner) is a converted Jew (Hans converted back to Judaism almost as an act of rebellion, becoming a Jewish atheist instead of a Lutheran atheist) who does not care for what he sees as his son's posturing. Actions which would in the 1920s have been nothing more than personal and familial of course become exceedingly dangerous as the Third Reich gets into its stride, hence Hans's final destination, no longer as a 'political', in Dachau. Fritz is not just a straw man as unsympathetic father. It is clear that his marriage to Imgard is under strain; and there is a moving if understated admission from him towards the end that he lost his boy but did not find the man - whereas Irmgard saw always the man that the boy was becoming.

Irmgard expects the force of her personality and her social position (she knows how to be obnoxious) to solve her problem. It leads to frustrating cat-and-mouse games with Conrad (John Light), whose superficial charm rarely if ever confuses her; but she is silenced by an outburst of visceral hatred on his part late in the proceedings. In the meantime the hope that intervention by a visiting British diplomat, Lord Clifford Allen (David Yelland), will be of help is dashed by his cold and supercilious refusal to listen to the realities of an individual's experience, in case it should disturb the diplomatic niceties - a summation of the dreadful misjudgement of appeasement in one short cameo scene.

The play is extremely powerful at a personal level, due to the excellence of the entire cast, and Penelope Wilton as Irmgard gives an especially strong performance, dignified and outraged, her composure cracking (but only briefly) in a moving encounter with her physically broken son. Martin Hutson manages the transformation of the self-assured lawyer Hans to the shambling, scarred and half-blinded prisoner with moving but unshowy detail; his unbending determination to live and die by the moral lessons he believes his mother instilled in him forces her unwillingly to withdraw her appeal to him to compromise during their fateful meeting.