“Nachtland”: Hitler, art, von Mayenburg, and Marber

The sheer nerve of Marius von Mayenburg’s “Nachtland” is a thrill: it’s the kind of gasp-inducing exercise that makes theatre feel pertinent, dangerous, wicked. This play, new in Germany in 2022, is now receiving its British premiere at the Young Vic in a spot-on, marvellously suspenseful production directed by Patrick Marber.

It’s been described as a satire, but it’s also borderline farce, sometimes a thriller, and occasionally moves firmly into the surreal. And what amazes most is that it’s a German comedy - always serious and often hilarious - about Germans dealing with the legacy of Hitler.

After the death of their father, Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Philipp (John Heffernan) find a painting in the attic which is (or is it?) by Hitler. From that beginning, the play is constructed - musically - like variations on a theme and also like turns of the screw. Every few minutes, the situation (what do you do with what may be a work of art by history’s most notorious monster?) is seen as big business (how much will this painting sell for?), as a moral crisis (shouldn’t anything by Hitler just be destroyed?), as an intense challenge to aesthetics (how good can any painting be that’s the creation of the man who also created the Holocaust?), and more. Philipp’s wife Judith (Jenna Augen) is Jewish: the quality of moral indignation she introduces to the play is marvellous, often disturbing in ways both healthy and infuriating, ways that keep developing astoundingly. One of her most disarming trump cards is her announcement that this signed painting is not by Hitler but Hiller, an admired painter who was not just Hitler’s contemporary but was much more successful as a painter: why on earth should there now be more interest in this painting if it’s by Hitler than if it’s by Hiller?

One arrival is Kahl (Angus Wright), a wittily cold Aryan magnate who heartlessly negotiates not only to pay a large sum for this small watercolour but then raises his price if Judith will spend the evening with him: her kind of blaze is just what he finds exciting. Judith then twists that situation further. And the appalling possibilities don’t stop there.

Along the way, Israel and Palestine are mentioned, as part of an escalating row between Philipp (who is Christian) and his wife. Coming at this precise moment in history, when the Israel-Palestine crisis is more loaded than when von Mayenburg’s play had its premiere in Germany, this causes the biggest gasp of all. On Tuesday’s press night, it also prompted a cheeky audience whistle, as if saluting the play’s boldness. (I wonder if the whistle wasn’t planted: perfectly, it highlighted the play’s courage while defusing the audience’s nervousness.)

If “Nachtland” were played throughout as a realistic account of a family crisis, it would be throughly implausible. Marber, brilliantly, instead catches its artifice. Changes of lighting and acting style make us precisely aware of each dramatic variation on the theme. Several of the play’s most startling twists enter with Evamaria (Jane Horrocks), an art historian expert in Nazi art: she’s a caricature and yet she’s chillingly real, bringing the authoritative voice of expertise to a situation that has hitherto been governed by the speculations of amateurs. It’s she who in due course brings Kahl to inspect and offer a price for the Hitler painting. But when we first see him, we’re briefly plunged deep into the surreal, as he delivers a shockingly vivid neo-Nazi dance in bare-buttocked underwear.

Judith, who at first appearance is naturalistically angry, keeps altering until, in the play’s most disconcerting variation, she suddenly becomes coolly still - and, of all unlikely things, sings, in long lines and with stingingly vibrant vocal tone. Nicola’s husband Fabian (Gunnar Cauthery) becomes a study in advanced neurosis, with a soliloquy that is the play’s first departure into the surreal. The Nicola-Philipp relationship, which begins as barbed sibling rivalry, changes, and changes again - until, in the play’s most bizarre variation, it turns into incestuous masturbation à deux. (Marber, very economically, accompanies several of these scenes with ideally chosen fragments from Wagner and Richard Strauss operas. Nothing is overdone.)

The Young Vic acoustics are challenging to any actor, with the audience seated on three sides of the action. At first, Myer-Bennett and Augen lack the crisp consonants that would land their words more potently around the auditorium; yet this may be part of a plan, since both women come to project quite differently as they play their parts in showing its less realistic and more surreal aspects. Horrocks, by contrast, at once arrives as a distinctly theatrical force onstage - her whole manner, incisive in her use of chesty vocal tone, shows us a completely unfamiliar side of this well-known actress - both taking charge of matters and transforming them. Heffernan, who has a gift for playing unassuming geniality, becomes here the most marvellously feckless character of the whole bunch, muddling his way through one landmine situation after another until unsuspected glints of malice and lust shine forth.

This is a marvellously bewildering play: you never know where it will go next. This excellent production transfers to the West End. London must see more work by von Mayenburg, a figure largely unknown here.

We know much more - but never enough - about Marber, whose diverse career as playwright, screenwriter, director, comedian, and (occasionally) actor has long made him one of the most impressive masters of British theatre. I have always thought of him as a classicist, an embodiment of the T.S.Eliot theory about tradition and the individual talent, consciously connecting his own creativity to the work of Molière, Racine, Turgenev, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinter, Mamet, Stoppard, and other masters. That has not been enough for him, however. At some point (probably with”Howard Katz”, 2001), well into his career, he began to address his own Jewish heritage in his own plays as well as in his direction of such productions as Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt”. Gradually this has deepened and enriched his work. In “Nachtland”, he’s absolutely alert to every nuance of this explosive comedy. The political, aesthetic, and moral implications keep us on the edge of our seats; and von Mayenburg and Marber, amazingly, keep making us laugh without ever brushing them aside.

@Alastair Macaulay 2024