Nachtland
What would you do if you found an ‘original Hitler’ in your late father’s attic? That’s the essential premise of ‘Nachtland’, and while you suspect an Anglo playwright might have turned in an acerbic but conventional dining room comedy, German writer Marius von Mayenburg has created something more difficult and confrontational than that. It begins with siblings Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Philipp (John Heffernan) bickering over the right to tell their late father’s story. She’s withering and highly strung, he’s blithe and a bit feeble. Their pass-agg back and forth over their deceased dad is fairly innocuous… until Nicola’s husband Fabian (Gunnar Cauthry) finds a painting in the attic, wrapped in brown paper. Nicola thinks the watercolour of an Austrian church is kitschy rubbish and wants to throw it out. Or she does until they see the artist’s signature - A Hitler - and it becomes obvious who the artist was, something confirmed by Jane Horrocks’s sinister Nazi art dealer Evamaria. The siblings start to see Euro signs - but Evamaria tells them they must prove the provenance of the painting and its connection to the family if they want to really rake in life-changing sums. So they set about establishing their family’s Nazi connections with aplomb - much to the horror of Philipp’s Jewish wife Judith (Jenna Augen), whose objections to the whole affair are met with withering disdain and low-level antisemitism from Nicola. It’s weirder than all that sounds: things start t