"What would you have done in my shoes?" The plaintive cry of composer Richard Strauss, backed into collaboration with the Nazi regime, echoes down the decades. These sophisticated dramas from Ronald Harwood, cleverly paired for the first time in a compelling double bill from Chichester Festival Theatre, serve as a ringing reminder that it is all too easy for us to import our moral absolutes from another time and another place.
Both pieces centre on distinguished German artists forced to account for their activities under the Third Reich. Taking Sides (1995), more satisfyingly complex because of the greater moral uncertainty surrounding its subject, pits legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (Michael Pennington) against American Major Steve Arnold (David Horovitch) of the De‑Nazification Commission in 1946 Berlin. Collaboration (2008) gives Strauss (Pennington again) an easier time of it, categorising his particular compromises as prudent moves to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law.
The two plays, seen together like this in elegant productions from Philip Franks, gain strength and depth from each other. It’s intriguing to witness the strong case for the prosecution in Sides but then to turn to Collaboration for evidence of how the Nazis squeezed until the pips squeaked.
Pennington is magnificent as the two music men, giving Furtwängler a patrician aloofness that recoils from Arnold’s dogged cultural ignorance, and showing how Strauss’s artistic self-absorption led to a dangerous divorce from reality and ultimately cost him his precious friendship with Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig (Horovitch). Horovitch’s chameleon brilliance means that he is unrecognisable in his switch between American bumptiousness and Austrian reserve.
This is a rich, rewarding trip to a place where guilt and innocence have been painted over by umpteen shades of grey.
Until 22 August (0844 412 4659, www.nimaxtheatres.com).
Taking Sides
Duchess Theatre
Catherine Street, WC2B 5LA
