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Haider (Alan Howard) is a kind of academic Walter Mitty. But unlike Thurber's daydreamer, Haider has fantasies of failure, doubt and dread. Something dreadful does actually happen to him, and the question-and-answer core of the late British playwright C.P. Taylor's play is how and why. How does a seemingly decent, liberal-minded man like Haider, who lectures on the German classics at the University of Frankfurt, and whose best friend Maurice (Joe Melia) is a Jewish psychoanalyst, wage a retreat from conscience that finds him at Auschwitz as the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann (Nicholas Woodeson)?
Taylor takes the tack that Haider is a victim of flattery, subtle intimidation and an inordinate love of the uniform. Out of the emotional stress accompanying his mother's senile dementia, Haider has written a pro-euthanasia novel. It conies to the Fuhrer's attention, and Haider admits to "the surge of pride in me! Reading that scrawled sentence in Adolf s shaky hand—It said: 'Written from the heart!' "
Haider's father-in-law suggests that he join the party, and he does. A major in the SS and an old World War I buddy (Pip Miller) suggests that he join the Nazi officer elite corps and he does. As a member of the SS he could secure the tickets to Switzerland for which Maurice pleads, but he is, by now, too self-intimidated to do so.
Orders are a chloroform he almost welcomes, for they put to sleep his sense of right and wrong. Thus he becomes chairman of the book-burning committee at his university and, resplendent in his SS uniform, goes out to police the burning of synagogues. His adoring mistress (Felicity Dean) convinces him that if they are good to each other and hurt no one knowingly, they are intrinsically good.
It might be possible to care more about Haider and his plight if he were not such a typically alienated antihero. The hero of the evening is Alan Howard. His is a meticulously stylized performance and a memorable display of the actor's craft. Howard's array of arid classroom gestures and pinched facial nerves is matched by a voice that barks, chokes, melts and freezes. And when he does a close-to-floor-level, slow-motion goose-step, the monstrous history of the Third Reich seems to be marching past.
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
by William Shakespeare
An old saw in racing circles has it that a Thoroughbred will always return to its best form. The Royal Shakespeare Company is certainly a Thoroughbred. After a stumbling start with Henry IV, the R.S.C. returns to top form at its new home, the Barbican Theater, by making the rarely performed All's Well That Ends Well an evening of enchantment.
All's Well is a difficult play, partly because it embraces tantalizing contradictions. It is romantic and antiromantic. It is rational in discourse, yet a strange current of magic, mystery and folklore courses through it. Even its lovers are drawn to each other only as opposites. Helena (Harriet Walter) is deep, pure and singleminded; Bertram (Philip Franks) is shallow, lecherous and two-faced.