The Chichester
Observer, 28th May 1995
Ronald Harwood’s “Taking Sides” defies its audience
to take sides.
With perfect balance, Harwood presents in all their
complexity the reasons why conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler was both wrong and
right to stay in Nazi Germany.
Harwood pitches Furtwangler, the voice of culture,
against a Major in American intelligence, the voice of pragmatism.
Furtwangler argues that to serve music is to serve
liberty, humanity and justice. The major can think only of the stench of death
at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
But it goes deeper than that. Furtwangler had to
stay in Germany if his musical pre-eminence was not to be challenged. Against
that, the Major is a near philistine who derides the greatest living conductor
as “the band-leader”.
The result is an undramatic-sounding subject which
becomes compellingly dramatic.
Daniel Massey is outstanding as the proud
conductor, flashing in anger at accusations which hit home more than he cares
to admit. And Michael Pennington excels as the hectoring, bullying Major.
It’s a debate taken up convincingly in the
secondary characters: Gawn Grainger is a sold-out musician-turned-informant;
Geno Lechner is the daughter of a hero who turned hero when he had no choice.
Suzanne Bertish bombards the Major with proof of
Furtwangler’s humanity; and Christopher Simon is a Jew who warms to
Furtwangler’s vision of a realm where music banishes pain.
Harold Pinter’s direction is tight, but not so
tight that he doesn’t let the play breathe.
The play’s modesty is its strength. It doesn’t set out
to resolve whether art can remain aloof from politics. It simply presents the
debate’s complexity – and in the form of a dramatic drama.
Chichester Festival Theatre can he hugely proud to
be staging its world premiere.
The Daily Telegraph
24th May 1995, Charles Spencer
At the end of Ronald Harwood’s magnificent new
play, the audience didn’t just clap, they stamped their feet with approval.
It’s the kind of behaviour you expect from an unruly rock audience rather than
sedate Chichester, but this is undoubtedly a work that deserves to be applauded
to the rafters. It holds the whole auditorium in thrall for two-and-a-half
hours, raising the most profound questions with piercing urgency and
comfortless clarity.
“Taking Sides” is set in a grand but cheerless
government building in the American zone of occupied Berlin in 1946. Here Major
Steve Arnold, a superficially amiable and informal American officer, is
conducting investigations into the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler,
prior to a denazification tribunal.
The case against Furtwangler is simple. He remained
in Germany throughout the Nazi regime rather than seeking exile like many of
his colleagues. He was photographed shaking Hitler’s hand and could be seen as
an “advertising slogan” for the Third Reich.
For much of the action it seems as if Harwood is
declaring his hand too early. Despite his baby face and broad smiles, Michael
Pennington’s major is a thug. Cheerfully philistine, he is absolutely
determined to “nail the bastard” and is completely unimpressed when anyone
speaks of Furtwangler’s genius as a musician. For the major, Furtwangler is
just another bandleader. What matters is that he collaborated with unspeakable
evil. In contrast, Furtwangler appears to be a man of manifest dignity. He is
played with an amazing mixture of sorrow and intensity by Daniel Massey, his
voice querulous with indignation, his eyes glinting as he goes into combat, his
whole body language suggesting a righteous man on the rack.
There is a good deal of evidence in his favour. We
learn how Furtwangler, like Schindler, used his Nazi contacts to save the lives
of Jews. And the conductor speaks with wonderful eloquence about his art, his
belief that music offered an alternative vision to the Nazi horror, a vision of
liberty, humanity and justice.
But an uncomfortable kernel of doubt remains. In
the second half we hear of the conductor’s anti-Semitic remarks, of his
jealousy of Karajan (who joined the Nazi party twice), of the rumour that
Furtwangler might have sent a hostile critic to his death.
But the biggest question of all is whether art can
ever be put in the scales against the death camps. You begin to understand the
major’s brutal hostility when you remember he is fresh from the horror of
Belsen.
Auden observed that his poetry didn’t save one Jew
from the gas chamber. Harwood’s play makes the even more disturbing point that
great art, the matchless music Furtwangler drew from his orchestra, was
actively enjoyed by the very people who sent the Jews to their deaths. What
does that say about the spiritual and redemptive qualities of art? What does it
matter that one man was unfairly treated because of his ambiguous role in such
a catastrophe?
“Taking Sides” resonates powerfully in both the
mind and the heart, and Harold Pinter’s production, atmospherically designed by
Eileen Diss, is virtually flawless. A master of menace and confrontation
himself, Pinter finds all the tensions and undercurrents in Harwood’s text; and
as well as the two compelling leading performances, the supporting roles are
superbly taken, with especially fine work from Gawn Grainger as a sad, craven
Nazi collaborator.
This is a tremendous play, tremendously performed.
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