Television
Up the bunker
Clive Gammon
When London Weekend lashes out two hours and an alleged £100,000 on a Sunday night play you can't ignore it even if it means missing Rex Harrison as Don Quixote on the other channel. A lot of time and a lot of money, and worth every penny and minute of it if they'd given The Death of Adolf Hitter the title that it clearly merited: Carry On — Up the Bunker!
Growing up under the influence of Low cartoons, and Nathaniel Gubbins's column in the Sunday Express (" Vot vas dot? Dot vos a bompf!"), I always knew Hitler was funny. What I wasn't aware of until Caroline Mortimer put it squarely to me in a hilarious performance in Vincent Tilsley's play was that Eva Braun was a real hoot as well. " Champagne for everyone in the bunker!" she radiated on her macabre wedding night. And, "Put your nightshirt on, Addie!" He did, too, which was a special triumph for her, she having failed in the other amorous passages depicted between her and the Leader to get him to take even his tie off.
There was a new light on Dr Goebbels as well, clearly better equipped than the old song would have us believe on the evidence of his six children (who pass their time in the bunker before it's time for their cyanide pills playing a board game called ' Get the Jews '). Goebbels (his ancient glittering eyes were gay) turned out a slightly dim media smoothy. "It will be so nice," he said, looking ahead to the mass suicide in the bunker and an Aryan afterlife, " — all of us together again."
To which, stealing the scene again, Eva rejoined, "I wonder where Jews go when they die?" You could sympathise with poor Addie when he said to her at another moment in the play, "Will you please stop thinking? It's quite out of character."
Yes, well, maybe my reaction was just nervous. I'd freely admit that when the Sunblest commercial came on at the end of Part One my shoulder muscles relaxed just an inch or two. And maybe uneasy laughter was part of Tilsley's plan. A complex Hitler was this one he gave us, and it would be ungracious at this point not to pay handsome tribute to the scope and skill of Frank Finlay in the part, and also to the rest of the fine cast.
Hitler screaming for the head of Himmler as Richard III screamed for Hastings's head. Hitler the junkie, sweat ing out his withdrawal symptoms. The cool, logical Hitler choosing Admiral Doenitz as his successor for complex reasons. Hitler the near-wit, allowing Eva not a white dress but a white carnation for their wedding. The entirely mad Hitler chanting, "Blood! Blood! Blood!" with Goebbels. Every kind of Hitler, in fact, except one that could convince us that he had the kind of magnetism needed to persuade clever men to remain loyal to him through his wild last days in the bunker.
And that is why, from time to time, right through this clever, often impressive play, I guffawed. Could Hitler conceivably have been so absurd? It's the only way it's possible to think of him, I suppose, and perhaps, in the last resort, the only way that Tilsley could think of him.
Just to take the Hitlerian taste away, a brief but well-merited welcome to .BBC2's Bristol-originated series, The Web of Life, which goes out on Thursdays. The first programme, on the ecology of a chalk stream, was pure pleasure.
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