This is writer Mark Hayhurst’s third account (following the drama The Man Who Crossed Hitler and documentary To Stop A Tyrant, both shown on BBC-TV in 2011) of German lawyer Hans Litten, who in 1931 summoned Hitler to appear as a witness in the trial of several SA troops and in a three-hour examination demonstrated what a sham the Nazi party’s claims to political legitimacy were. Hitler never forgave Litten; on the night of the Reichstag fire he was taken into “protective custody”, and after five years of beatings and torture hanged himself in Dachau in 1938. This play, which comes into London in the production first seen at Chichester in the autumn, focuses on the efforts of Litten’s middle-class mother to secure his release, her dogged refusal either to give up or to be intimidated by Gestapo officialdom.
    
Penelope Wilton exudes indomitability from every pore as Irmgard Litten, both in the drama proper and in the testimony of her narration. Martin Hutson as Hans embodies rather more human limits to resistance, but still shows an adherence to principle which even he is unable to repress for an easier time of it. Allan Corduner as Litten’s father is more contemplative, and therefore in the moral scheme of the play weaker; John Light as the Gestapo officer in charge of the case is as urbane as one can be in jackboots, eschewing menace or threats in favour of a managerial strain of villainy.
    
Director Jonathan Church’s tenure at Chichester has shown him to be almost unequalled in walking fine lines between opposing theatrical preferences. But there can be only one set of moral expectations here: we may see sympathetically portrayed personal complexities between the Litten family’s members, but no-one for a second is going to say or do anything that might be interpreted as giving comfort to the Nazis. At times Hayhurst seems to be embracing the 21st-century orthodoxy that even the slightest degree of understanding is tantamount to appeasement and treason. One has only to hear now-familiar weasel phrases such as "legitimate grievances" put into the mouths of appeasers to suspect how slanted a picture is being presented. The play opened to press on the day a British MP suggested the possibility of banning Mein Kampf, which even cautious Germany has not done. One does not overcome evil by prohibiting proper scrutiny of it.
    
Written for the Financial Times.