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| Albert
Speer - The National Theatre
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The
Guardian - 26/5/00 Michael Billington
Did he know or didn't he? Was he aware
of the Final Solution? That is the question
that haunts any discussion of Albert Speer.
But David Edgar's new play, based on Gitta
Sereny's biography, only gets to grips
with the big moral issues in the second
half, after what often seems an impersonal
recital of recorded events... Even more
than Sereny's book, Edgar's play leaves
you with the impression that Speer was
fully aware at the time of what was going
on. Edgar also gives Hitler a powerful
climactic speech in which he turns on
his followers and asks why he was never
taken literally when he talked of destruction
and elimination, as he says to Speer,
"You realised my vision." The
final impression of Speer is of a man
who lied to himself and others in order
to live with his conscience. As drama,
it is full of slow-gathering power. And
Trevor Nunn's panoramic production contains
an overwhelming performance from Alex
Jennings that combines Speer's ambition
and guilt, and a no less fine one from
Roger Allam as a Hitler who is
Mephistopheles to Speer's Faust. By the
end of a long evening the play has also
given us insight into the strange, truth-evading
soul of the articulately evasive Albert
Speer.
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| The
Independent - 26/5/00 Paul Taylor
David Edgar's play is based on Gitta
Sereny's monumental intimately researched
study of this most fascinating and
morally ambiguous of Hitler's henchman.It
is suffused with her sense that Speer
deserves to be regarded as a classically
tragic figure on account of his fight
to remake himself and his tortured
struggle with the mind's natural psychological
defences against facing the full hideous
and annihilating truth. As one of
his daughter's memorably puts it "How
can a man admit more and go on living?"
The play is like a teeming historical
pageant, marshalled with enormous
skill and vividness by the director
Trevor Nunn.it is impressive and engrossing.a
sublime history lesson.
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| Daily
Telegraph - 26/5/00 Charles Spencer
For some time now, Trevor Nunn has
been taking considerable stick for
his inability to find strong new drama
for the National Theatre. The long
dearth has undoubtedly come to an
end, however, with David Edgar's gripping
play about Albert Speer, Hitler's
architect who subsequently became
armaments minister and the second
most powerful figure in the Third
Reich.
It is a vastly ambitious piece that
combines epic production values and
strong narrative drive with fascinating
historical and philosophical speculation.the
audience is completely under the spell
of theatre at its most intelligent
and enthralling.
Edgar has based his play on Gitta
Sereny's magisterial biography Albert
Speer: His Battle With the Truth.his
great achievement is to create a play
that stands as a work of gripping
drama in its own right, greatly helped
by Trevor Nunn's fluid and sometimes
dreamlike staging, Ian MacNeil's dark
oppressive designs and an exceptional
cast who bring a vast gallery of characters
to vivid life.
In many ways the first half is a dark
love story, as the intelligent, urbane,
vastly ambitious Speer falls under
the spell of the Fuhrer.this first
half is dominated by Roger Allam's
mesmerising and deeply disconcerting
performance as Hitler.
The play works exceptionally well
in the almost philosophical exploration
of Speer's complicity in the utter
evil of the holocaust.Alex Jennings
harrowingly captures his character's
anguish, and his furtive culpability,
while the nightmare sequence at the
moment of his death sends shivers
racing down the spine. This is theatre
at its potent best.
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The
Express
This was,
in hindsight, always going to be an impossible
task. How do you dramatise a war-torn
chunk of the 20th century with Hitler
centre stage? The answer is you probably
can't as this intelligent but frankly
disappointing epic by David Edgar proves...
For three and a half hours the play roams
over the question as to whether he did
or didn't know about the Jews. Moral ambiguity
only goes so far. Trevor Nunn's production
is full of rallies, family scenes and
some unwatchable death camp footage. It
has brilliant flourishes. But for me the
evening never really got under my skin.
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The
London Evening Standard
David Edgar and his director Trevor Nunn
have been seduced by the expensive thrills
of Hollywood bioepics and grand scenes
of historical soap opera in transporting
Hitler's Armaments' Minister, Albert Speer,
from printed page to spectacular stage...
The excitement of the book lies in ideas,
in its depiction of Speer's complex state
of mind and suggestion of why and how
he long remained in denial about his complicity
in Hitler's extermination of the Jews.
By contrast Edgar's adaptation, loosely
based on the Sereny biography, is far
more interested in speeding us through
Speer's brilliant career, his close encounters
and Ministerial collaborations with Hitler,
his prison term and penitence, than any
tussle with truth or scrutiny of their
relationship... Edgar has thickened his
three-hour play with loads of redundant
material. He has done so at the expense
of Sereny's intellectual cut and thrust
about conscience, guilt and self-deception.
Nunn's opulently cluttered, large-cast
production, with Speer and Hitler clambering
over a no-expenses-spared mock-up model
of the New Berlin, is all epic scope and
too little intimate focus. Great questions
are raised and remain suspended in hot
air.
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