Lord Chandos was right
Herr Rolf Hochhuth's play Soldiers achieved notoriety earlier this year when the board of the National Theatre turned it down against the advice and impassioned remonstrations of its director, Sir Laurence Olivier, and his alter ego, Mr Kenneth Tynan—the first time such a thing had happened since the National Theatre's inception some six years ago. Now, at last, thanks to the demise of the Lord Chamberlain, it has opened in London with much éclat, under the aegis of the same Mr Tynan, but at a commercial theatre.
Its reception has been mixed. Our own critic, Hilary Spurling, writing on page 885 of this issue, admires the play but not the London production. Herr Hochhuth is obvi- ously a writer of real if undisciplined dramatic talent, of a neo-Shavian kind, with a welcome eagerness to tackle big themes. But it is not our object here to discuss the play's dramatic qualities: rather, the wider issues involved.
The first of these issues is that of Herr Hochhuth's purpose in writing Soldiers. Hap- pily, as with Shaw in his prefaces, this emerges with reasonable clarity in a long and stilted prologue (eliminated, incidentally, in the current London production). The play has more than one theme; but a key element is the propagandist advocacy of -the thesis that re- sponsibility for the horrors of the last war belongs equally to the leaders of all the coun- tries involved. Hence the play's concentration on Churchill (described in the lengthy stage directions as a warmonger by nature) and on the British mass bombing of German cities. (This has been a consistent theme of Hoch- huth's: his previous play, The Representa- tive, sought to hold the Pope jointly respon- sible for the murder of millions of Jews.) • Ostensibly, this blanket 'raceme' is justi- fied partly by Hochhuth's pessimistic view of human nature, partly by a naive marxist be- lief in the inevitability of war so long as there is capitalism. 'Oh yes—very good for busi- ness it is. We none of us object to making money : ergo—if people can make money out of making war, then war they will make,' explains the 'Everyman' figure; while the only hopeful note in the entire prologue comes when the allegorical `Messenger' figure de- clares 'Revolution will take the place of war. I hope-- . . . the whole capitalist system be- comes with every year more grotesque.' It is difficult to be sure how far Hochhuth's marx- ism is genuine, and how far it is a useful device to enable a German, who may under- standably find the burden of his country's recent guilt intolerable, to share that guilt by indicting a whole system. But the propaganda message is clear and unequivocal.
In order to put this message across in dramatically effective terms Hochhuth, as is well known, has written a `historical' play that is a tissue of lies from start to finish. A number of them are listed by our own critic. The most notable, which occupies a central role in the play (even though it is not strictly essential to the author's argument) is the assertion that General Sikorski, the Polish Premier, was assassinated on Churchill's in- structions (after, allegedly, the failure of three previous attempts). This myth is not, of course, new: it was invented during the war by the Nazi propaganda machine.
It is, however, open to Herr Hochhuth to defend himself on the grounds that he is con- cerned with more fundamental moral and dramatic truths, with the genuine dilemmas that confront all war leaders and the bestial acts that even the best-intentioned of them— if they are to win—may have to perform; and that in this context mere historical veracity is unimportant. This line is taken by many of Hochhuth's most ardent supporters, among them Mr Kenneth Tynan. Whether they would feel the same of a play that showed, say, Dr Verwoerd as the sole remaining bastion of decent, civilised values, and de- picter] the Sharpevilie incident as an attempt by a gang of mercenaries in the pay of Fidel Castro to provoke a bloody black uprising, has yet to be put to the test.
But the curious thing is that this is not the excuse adopted by Herr Hochhuth him- self, who insists, against all evidence, that every element in his play is the literal, his- torical truth. To sustain this, he has had to create a whole- additional edifice of extra- theatrical lies, some of them of a paranoid nature, most of which are even more easily exposed than those in the play itself. And he still insists that his ultimate vindication lies in evidence secreted in the vaults of a %VIC', bank, not to be opened for fifty years.
That the play has now reached London where it can be judged on its merits (at every level) is all to the good. But Lord Chandos and his fello}v-members of the National Theatre board deserve to be congratulated for their courage in having refused, in the face of a barrage of ill-informed and near-hysterical abuse, to have the play performed at the National Theatre. It is hair-raising that it was ever contemplated.
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