HANNAH & MARTIN. To 22 June.
London.
HANNAH & MARTIN
by Kate Fodor.
Courtyard Theatre 40 Pitfield Street N1 6EU To 22 June 2008.
Tue-Sun 7.30pm.
Runs 2hr 25min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 163 0717.
www.seetickets.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 June.
Ideas and enthusiasms in troubled times.
Not just any old Martin or any young Hannah. Heidegger was a leading 20th-century philosopher who could inspire as well as seduce a slim and intelligent female student like Hannah Arendt. But he was himself seduced by National Socialism, influencing minds towards Nazism as surely as youth leader Baldur von Schirach did the children of 1930s Germany.
Von Schirach’s excuses, in glimpses of his Nuremberg trial, are no more convincing than the longer explanations Heidegger gives his former student when she visits him after the war. By then power has changed hands. But his arrogance remains evident in Greg Patmore’s performance, like that of his wife Elfride, who once tried recruiting a student for the Nazis, unaware he was Jewish.
Only such practical stupidity could explain Heidegger’s linking of Greek civilisation and enjoyment of conducting records of Wagner with supporting Hitler. Dramatist Kate Fodor suspends judgement, but the analogy between Heidegger and von Schirach is clear, and the play ends as the latter’s guilt is affirmed and his sentence about to be announced.
Vivienne Rowdon is good as the impressionable young woman, over whom her tutor’s confident brilliance casts a spell as does Wagner’s music over him. Later, there’s only the prosecution on view at Nuremberg, but Arendt, having attacked him, returns to Heidegger’s defence, recanting her former criticisms.
By this time Arendt was 40, yet Rowdon remains much slighter and younger in voice, looks and manner. Her own American student condemns her support for Heidegger, in an ethical quandary Fodor – perhaps deliberately - never resolves. It’s hard to think the mature Arendt would not have firmer arguments for her change of stance. Here it seems to boil down to Heidegger’s explanation for not helping a fellow academic with a Jewish wife.
As that academic, Tim Charrington gives a fine performance, contrasting Heidegger with openness, honesty and smiling enjoyment of life. With reliable support from other cast members, Pat Garrett’s production efficiently lets the play’s issues speak for themselves, without delving deeply into the complex of emotions and thoughts motivating Arendt’s later responses to her mentor, seducer and intellectual betrayer.
Hannah Arendt: Vivienne Rowdon.
Martin Heidegger: Greg Patmore.
Karl Jaspers/Baldur von Schirach: Tim Charrington.
Gertrude Jaspers/Prosecutore: Sarah Simpkins.
Elfride Heidegger: Stacy Thurnes.
Gunther Stern/Radio Announcer: Robert Wedig.
Alice: Sarah Savage.
Director: Pat Garrett.
Lighting: Giuliano Bocca.
Costume: Becky Brown.
2008-06-17 00:23:50