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A fascinating real-life premise and an excellent turn from Richard Clothier as a deluded Heinrich Himmler make this new play by Ben Brown worthwhile, even if Alan Strachan's production is resolutely inert – you could close your eyes and the whole thing would probably land exactly the same.
‘The End of the Night’ details the extraordinary real-life 1945 meeting that Himmler’s well-off, well-connected masseur Felix Kersten brokered between the Reichsfuhrer and Norbert Masur, a German-born Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress.
His mission: to persuade Himmler that he might be looked upon more leniently after Germany’s inevitable defeat if he released some of the last remaining prisoners in German concentration camps to the Red Cross, for transfer onwards to Sweden.
Set entirely in Kersten’s country estate, Brown’s text nonetheless manages to establish a nice sense of the cracked weirdness of the Third Reich in its final days: descriptions of the mail flight from Stockholm to Tempelhoff; the long journey along lightless, bombed-out roads to the estate; the constant Allied bombings; the rival factions of troops loyal to different individual Nazi leaders; the unstoppable encroachment of the Red Army; the sinister, nonsensical broadcast put out on the radio to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.
When Clothier’s Himmler finally shows up, there’s something horribly fascinating about how recognisable he is as a politician: Teflon-coated, scrupulously polite, and with a habit of acting as if it’s rather vulgar to bring up his appalling crimes against humanity and smoothly changing the subject. He starts by giving Ben Caplan’s agog everyman Masur a brisk lecture on why Germany had never wanted to implement the Final Solution but had felt obliged to. Throughout he frets about negative personal coverage in the foreign press (as if his reputation was somehow redeemable), and floats bizarre ideas, like the notion that with Hitler removed, Germany might team up with the Allies to rout Russia. I have no idea if this is a reasonable reflection of Himmler’s state of mind at the time (bear in mind he killed himself shortly afterwards), but he comes across exactly like a slick, evasive modern politician who wound up where he did out of a desire for power rather than deep-rooted ideology and has yet to realise that the same skills won’t help him survive this.
It’s a great depiction, as writing and performance. But that’s not nearly enough to make it a great play: ‘The End of the Night’ is far too static and talky, and while Himmler is (in)famous enough to not really require a great deal of introduction, Kersten feels like an extremely under-explained figure. Even if you take the fact he was a jet-setting masseur who helped broker this extraordinary meeting in your stride, it feels like there are a lot of other questions to ask about him and his relationship with Himmler that are only glancingly raised at best. The sheer affability of Michael Lumsdsen’s avuncular turn as Kersten is the closest we get to an explanation: he was just a really great guy! But that hardly amounts to a convincing portrait.
Ultimately Brown’s brought this semi-forgotten story to wider public attention, and he’s done it… reasonably. And really, as a service to history, that’s enough. But there’s undoubtedly a better play in these events.