![]() She ranks alongside Hannah Arendt, whose phrase " the banality of evil", Sereny came to dislike. Few people in the 20th century have done as much as her to explore the nature of moral evil. Mass murderer Franz Stangl, one-time commendant of the Treblinka death camp, died of heart failure 19 hours after he spoke these words to the remarkable investigative journalist Gitta Sereny. He had pronounced the words 'my guilt': but more than the words, the finality of it was the sagging of his body, and on his face." 'So yes,' he said finally, very quietly, 'in reality I share the guilt … Because my guilt … my guilt … only now in these talks … now that I have talked about it all for the first time …' He stopped. These few sentences has taken almost half an hour to produce. 'But I was there,' he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. He gripped the table with both hands as if he were holding on to it. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. 'I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself,' he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again – for a long time. He paused and waited, but the room remained silent. Evil becomes the everyday in this contemplative examination of human cruelty."'My conscience is clear about what I did myself,' he said, in the same stiffly spoken words he has used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. ![]() Nicholls uses the set as a mirror, suggesting that people like us are capable of evil. As the final lights beam into the audience, showing us a distorted reflection of ourselves in the walls of the interrogation room, we are left with the disturbing question of what we would have done in Stangl’s position. Despite such wordy documentary material, Nicholls holds his audience captive for the plays entirety through content, acting performances and his own theatrical direction. The removal of his jacket, the unbuttoning of waistcoat, the eventual removal of tie, mark his rapid deterioration. ![]() We begin to anticipate their return each time the lights cut out, but still catch ourselves jumping with comical fright each time they do, adding to the unsettling feeling that the content of Burnett’s extended monologues bring.īurnett offers a magnificently accurate portrayal of this proud, but quickly fraying man, becoming slightly weaker and scruffier each time the lights come back up. Stuart Jenkins’ harsh lighting between scenes, along with the loud, screeching rumble that resembles a tape recorder ending, causes disorientation and discomfort. With jackets still half on, in the midst of assessing the Perspex cube that encloses Neil Haynes’s interrogation room set, blinding lights startle attendees into their seats. However, Burnett’s continually twitching hands, often restrained behind his back, offer a true sign of the horrors he has seen – a hint at his guilty conscience – and it is not long before the cracks in his psyche begin to transpire.Īudience members are given no time to settle into the theatre on entering pre-performance. With his hair slicked back, waistcoat fastened and tie pulled tightly to his neck, he initially exudes a cold and austere demeanour. The commandant spends a gruelling two hours attempting to explain his complicity in the atrocities to Sereny, played by Blythe Duff, who sought to evaluate how this ordinary man could rationalise the genocide that he helped to conduct. Gareth Nicholls’ production and intricate analyses of these key moments highlight how easily evil can come into existence and how we may be closer to it than we think.Ĭliff Burnett plays the convicted Nazi war criminal, Stangl, who oversaw the deaths of nearly 1 million people during World War II. ![]() Robert David MacDonald’s gripping adaptation of Gitta Sereny’s study of evil, Into That Darkness, condenses her 60-hour interview with Franz Stangl into two hours of meticulously chosen scenes.
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