Taken At Midnight review, Minerva Theatre, Chichester

Mark Hayhurst's new play about Hans Litten, the German lawyer who paid a cruel price for humiliating Hitler in the dock, is called Taken At Midnight. The title of the play is indicative of a lack of precision across the whole piece. The hour of Litten's arrest and incarceration in successive concentration camps is historically important  (the night of the Reichstag fire) but not to the story being told.  Similarly, once it is clear that Litten's arrest in 1933 is because he was a leading prosecutor who made fun of Hitler during a case against Nazi brownshirts in 1931, do we need to know any more about his captors?

Taken At Midnight is, anyway, more the story of Litten's mother, Irmgard, and her unwavering campaign for her son's release. Penelope Wilton's Imrgard morphs imperceptibly from an indomitable upper class matriarch to a tired and mournful supplicant brought low by her inability to influence Hans' fate. Her story is that of mothers through the ages, today Doreen Lawrence and the Yazidi weeping for stolen daughters. As Hans, Martin Hutson is superb. His deterioration from vital young lawyer to brutalised, blinded, camp inmate is utterly convincing. Allan Corduner is Fritz, Litten's Jewish-born, Christian convert father.  Elegantly understated, we see the fear and ambiguity of a man who has been exposed as an outsider through his son's exploits.

The acting is great, but the script for Taken At Midnight is inconsistent. The first half has Wilton knocking out too many standard observations cloaked as great truths. In prison, Hans' exchanges with fellow political prisoners demonstrate his bravado in the Hitler trial, but provide no sense of what drives him as a man. Too much time is given to the motivation of individual Nazis when the story is about the Littens.  Good scenes lose momentum because the dialogue continues after they've peaked. That said, there are genuinely tense moments in the second half, and one that reduced me to tears.

In conclusion: The interval discussion was that Taken At Midnight was important but boring. And that it was lovely to see the lady from Downton Abbey in the flesh. Where it works it works well, but in his determination to clarify and underscore the principles involved, Hayhurst relies on the subject matter, rather than the characters, to supply the emotional welly.

References
Minerva Theatre, Tickets

Minerva Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, Oaklands Park, PO19 6AP.        Run ends November 1