The New Theatre, Dublin
“He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again,” begins Hans Schwarz, the narrator of Fred Uhlman’s fictionalised memoir of a German Jewish childhood under the spectre of Nazism. A charismatic figure with apparently inflexible beliefs and a growing number of followers, the object of Hans’s fascination is not – as you might suspect – the future leader of his country. Instead it’s the new boy in school: Count Konradin von Hohenfels.
What follows in Uhlman's 1971 novella is something between a bildungsromanand a love story, at first misty with nostalgia, privilege and detail, gradually ceding to an ugly awakening. Early, the young protagonist loses faith in God, while his father, a Jewish doctor and decorated WWI hero, is resolute that his country will return to its senses. The Nazis, he says, are "a temporary illness . . . like measles". The contagion of septic beliefs and the buttress of good moral sense becomes a clash between friends, though, and we all know where it leads: the familiar history bitterly recalled in Hans's affluent American exile.
The book has been adapted before, in a screenplay by Harold Pinter, and though it couldn’t emulate Uhlman’s painterly detail, it tried to give the narrative a dramatic structure built around the adult narrator’s return to Germany. Ronan Wilmot’s stage adaptation for the New Theatre is more doggedly faithful to Uhlman’s prose at the expense of theatrical ingenuity, directing Daniel Reardon through a lightly edited first-person narration that almost counts as a staged reading.
Reardon, presenting a neat and haunted figure who would rather forget than remember, gives a fluent and engaging performance, delivering the story with clarity and efficiency. Still, you scour the production for comment or transformation: an accidental salute from Reardon to prefigure the Sieg Heils to come, or the discordance in Lisa Krugel’s design, which renders a New York apartment overlooking Central Park as a Nazi neoclassical window onto colourless scrub land, as though an inescapable past is closing in.
Nothing they can do, however, will alleviate the pat ending of the novella, the film, and now the play: a surprise that is ultimately more disconcerting than reassuring in its abruptness. Like the evils in this story, even good actions are unfathomable acts in a world without reason.
Runs until November 27.
