Review: KITTEL at the Unity Theatre ****

Everyone is aware of the phrase – all it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.

Good and evil is, in theory at least, binary and stark. Black and white. Right and wrong. But reality, that place where good intentions and moral certainties come up against human frailty – greed, ambition, cowardice, self-interest, indifference - is much more grey and muddy than that.

Catherine Harrison’s quietly powerful and thought-provoking new play, brought to the Unity Theatre stage by Liverpool’s Heirs of Banquo Productions, is a cautionary fable not about what happens when supposedly ‘good’ men do nothing, but when they open the door to evil and help usher it in.

KITTEL: Doktor Faustus of the Third Reich, to give it its full title, is described as a ‘Faustian reimagining’ of the real-life story of 20^th Century German evangelical theologian and Lutheran pastor Professor Gerhard Kittel.

If you’ve never heard of Kittel, you’ll certainly have heard of some of the men he came into contact with or, as this play argues, his academic theories influenced – figures such as Goebbels, Eichmann and a certain uncle of Liverpool lad Billy Hitler.

Kittel (John Henry, who is also responsible for the production's atmospheric score) was a devoted scholar of Hebrew and enjoyed a warm pupil-mentor relationship with the Jewish scholar, Rabbi and teacher Issar Kahan (Omar Hussein in a performance of dignity and stoicism).

Yet he was also a man of contradictions.

Because despite his affection and respect for Kahan and his friendly relationship with other Jewish academics, Kittel was also an early recruit to the Nazi Party who promoted his knowledge of Jewish scripture, culture and history in a pamphlet which posited various alternative ‘solutions’ to the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Solutions which certainly captured the imagination of the party's top brass.

Harrison takes the facts of Kittel’s life story and spins them into a tense and very sobering piece of theatre which moves backwards and forward through the 20^th Century, from the 1970s where real-life tenacious young historian Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewtiz (Georgia Laity) battles to shine a light on the theologian’s role in the Nazis' unspeakable crimes, to his early academic years in pre-Great War Germany, the fall of the Weimar Republic and rise of National Socialism and the subsequent horrors of the Second World War.

Above: Kyle Brookes as Adolf Hitler. Top: A young Gerhard Kittel (John Henry) with his mentor Issar Kahan (Omar Hussein)

If Goethe’s Faust met the devil at a crossroads, Harrison’s Kittel first encounters him in a railway station as the young theologian prepares to take up his post as a chaplain in the Kaiser’s wartime navy.

He may not sport a pair of horns and a tail (in fact, he’s dressed like Herr Flick of the Gestapo-meets-Nosferatu), but Kyle Brookes radiates sly malevolence and deep moral decay as Herr Herold who is ‘fishing for souls’.

This fishing expedition leads him to pop up in unexpected places – weirdly, Henry’s Kittel doesn’t appear to think this odd – and, Belial like, to pour vile ideas and arguments into his ear which then re-emerge from the mild mannered theologian's mouth as torrid talking points and antisemitic rants starkly at odds with his upstanding family man persona.

If the devil has all the best tunes, Brookes also has many of the ‘worst’ people in history to bring to life; a collection of Nazi thugs, gangsters, ideologues and monsters including Goebbels, Hitler and ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele. While he plays the Nazi hierarchy at impressive full throttle - he has Hitler's histrionics down to a tee, the quiet matter-of-factness of his Mengele is arguably even more chilling.

Henry’s Kittel is ultimately undone by a combination of vaunting ambition and deep self-regard, ardent nationalism, the flattery of public recognition for his academic practice and his appointment as head of the ‘Jewish question’ department in the Reich Institute for the History of a New Germany. Imagine an antisemitic ‘Ministry of Truth’ busy rewriting the past to rationalise the present.

Director Jed Birch navigates a steady path through a busily shifting timeframe populated by a large cast of characters, and both he and the audience are assisted in that by a digital date and location prompt which appears at the start of each new scene.

There's no doubt it's a challenging and at time emotionally draining watch, and at two-and-a-half hours including interval it's also a long one. I suspect there's room for a little paring back here and there without the piece losing any of its punch.

And it certainly has plenty of that. Because while it's a story from history, Kittel also has important things to say for the here and now, a world increasingly fractured by hate and fear and division and blame, and in the midst of which antisemitism of every complexion is on the rise.