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The story of German lawyer Hans Litten is not as well-known as it ought to be. Mark Hayhurst’s new play strives to fix that, by telling of the remarkable moment when Litten stood up to Adolf Hitler, and his subsequent, terrible punishment for it.
A fiery left-winger, Litten forced Hitler to give evidence in the trial of a group of SA men accused of manslaughter in 1931 and then cross-examined him for three hours. It rattled Hitler, and Litten paid a heavy price. When the dictator came to power in 1933, Litten, along with other political opponents of the regime, was taken into ‘protective custody’ on the night of the Reichstag fire.
Hayhurst’s eloquent play focuses on events after Litten’s arrest, in which his mother Irmgard pushes, bargains and talks day after day with a Gestapo officer to try to secure her son’s release. It’s a heavy, thankless journey as Litten is moved from Spandau Prison to Sonnenburg concentration camp then finally on to Dachau. But Irmgard is a jewel of a character: sharply intelligent, strong and human. Penelope Wilton plays her with hard dignity and sharp wit. It is a towering performance, which shows us a loving mother at heart, being torn to shreds underneath the facade of a composed pragmatist who knows the only way of saving something of her son is to play the villains’ game.
Jonathan Church’s superb, pacy and devastating production is another transfer from the perennially successful Chichester Festival Theatre. Robert Jones’s designs are dark with an angled prison cell at the back of the stage and a large empty floor at the front. The two spaces show the closeness of the mother and son and also their distance – only once do they cross over into each other’s worlds. Matthew Scott’s avant-garde jazz music ripens the air with foreboding.
It’s not the lightest of evenings, but the pleasure of watching it comes from witnessing the true individual battles fought against a hulking mass of violence, whilst also paying tribute to a mother’s tireless attempts to save her son.