The Good German

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday May 3, 2008

Reviewed by Stephen Dunne

THE GOOD GERMAN

Black Pearl Theatre Company

Seymour Centre, April 30

Until May 24

Reviewed by Stephen Dunne

LIKE most people, initially, all four Germans in David Wiltse's play are good in their self-imagined way. Gretel (Linden Wilkinson) is the most obviously virtuous, deciding in 1941 to shelter her Jewish mate Wilhelm (Mark Lee).

Gretel hasn't told her husband, Karl (Ivar Kants). It's a gamble, as Karl is an apparently respectable anti-Semite, spouting easy racism dressed up as cultural concern with lots of metaphors about decline, parasitology and contagion.

Karl's childhood friend Siemi (Frank van Putten) has joined the Nazi administrative machine, but his flimsy humanism is soon subsumed by Albert Speer-like complications.

At best, Wiltse's play portrays the self-justifying graduations of accommodation to fascism, and the traditional wretched excuses for failing to take a stand.

The decision to kill off the only ethically interesting character early is surprising. It is difficult to believe the play is not some forgotten 1950s boilerplate melodrama; it was written in 2003.

Sheryl Sciro's mechanistic production magnifies the text's cliches, assisted by Graham MacLean's fussy design.

The acting is fine throughout (Lee's fist-clenching silences and Kants's blustering irrationality especially), but there is only so much that even skilled performers can do with such clunky old-school melodrama.

This play and production have its heart and politics in the right place, but subtlety and dramaturgy are distinctly absent. While the lesson of the Holocaust is to never forget, it is surely acceptable to demand more skilfully constructed and directed fictional memories.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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