Some playwrights bring their lives into the theater. Others bring only their reading lists. The Man in the Glass Booth proves that Playwright Robert Shaw, the English actor and novelist, has read accounts of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as well as Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Israel and the comments on Hannah Arendt's book. Unfortunately, his play recapitulates the past without transforming it. It raises the stale questions of German guilt, Jewish passivity and the paranoic personality of the archkiller, along with a recital of atrocities. But it offers no fresh illumination.
An actor and a director are the play's most impressive assets. In the central role, Donald Pleasence gives a performance of atomic power and blinding virtuosity; Harold Pinter directorially chills the stage to doom temperature. The very first scene bursts on the playgoer with somber eclat. In an elegant private chapel, dim as a catacomb, a finger of light rests on Pleasence as he kneels rapt in prayer. The Verdi Requiem saturates the air like incense. Suddenly, the stage is ablaze with light, louvers are turning, and the backdrop becomes a penthouse view of Manhattan's skyscrapers.
The lord of this glass-and-concrete palace is a Jewish real estate mogul named Arthur Goldman (Pleasence). Goldman has a jigsaw-puzzle personality. He wants only a "kosher" staff around him, yet he indulges in acridly anti-Semitic remarks. With bewildering rapidity, his accented spray of words veers from the clever to the vulgar to the mad. In a sense, Goldman is the kind of Angst-ridden creature a very bright student might have constructed after making a close study of how Harold Pinter fashions his characters. Since Shaw acted the mentally disturbed older brother in Pinter's The Caretaker, the influence is scarcely surprising.
But is Goldman really Jewish? Convinced that Goldman is actually Adolf Dorff, a former SS colonel expressly charged with the extermination of Jews, three armed Israeli agents abduct him for trial. The court scene that dominates Act II is a desultory affair. It would be a sleepy bore except for Pleasence's arrogant depiction of Dorff. At one point, he rises in his glass booth to deliver a kind of prose love poem to his Führer. The speech rises toward erotic ecstasy so that the climaxing "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" is an orgasm of fanaticism. It terrifyingly evokes Hitler's own idea that the masses are feminine and wish to be seduced.
Ultimately, a spectator at the trial announces that Goldman is really a Jew [the telltale SS tattoo in his armpit urns out to be a self-inflicted cigar burn). This denouement makes the playwright seem like a bumbling amateur and the Israeli secret agents as incredibly inept. Goldman, it appears, was a kind of Christ-surrogate who wanted to be martyred so that his people might feel that some fitting atonement had been made for the monstrous wrongs done them. But Shaw's conception of martyrdom makes it seem less a matter of conscience that an attention-getting device on a grandiose scale. Some crimes—and the murder of the Jews is certainly one—dwarf atonement and defy retributive justice. A token of evil can be caged in a glass booth, but evil itself can never be exorcised there.