Bon appetit

Amongst Friends
Hampstead

Taking Sides/Collaboration
Duchess

At the Duchess there’s a Ronald Harwood double about musicians during the Third Reich. In Taking Sides an American army investigator quizzes Hitler’s favourite conductor, Furtwängler, about his involvement with the bad guys. This has the makings of an acute moral and psychological thriller: the musical genius with a dark past pitched against the virtuous but unimaginative army copper. What’s missing is any subtlety or psychological layering. The army man is a bullying Milwaukee philistine convinced of his quarry’s guilt. Because he’s American he says things like ‘swell’ and ‘son of a gun’. And swears a lot. Furtwängler is a formulaic German virtuoso. He’s all frosty grandeur and sub-Wagnerian guff about music and its eternal wish to grasp the essence of the human soul. Or something like that. Michael Pennington does his best to bring some humanity to this plasticine miniature but all he can do is frown, scratch his hair and put on that look of exquisitely pained forbearance that Magnus Magnusson might have worn after asking, ‘Name the second book of the Old Testament’, and hearing ‘Pass’.

The second play, about Richard Strauss’s friendliness with certain top Nazis, is lighter, funnier and better all round. The story unfolds before our eyes, rather than being dredged up from the filthy pond of the past. There’s a great opening gag. Enter Strauss, agitated. ‘I’m dying!’ Mrs Strauss, ‘Not again.’ The hot-and-cold relationship between the composer and his Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig, is traced with warmth and good humour, but when the drama deepens Harwood’s lack of range lets him down. His plays invariably peak with an attempted howl of Shakespearean anguish, which usually comes out as a peal of wine-glass-shattering self-pity. Strauss mounts to his moment of tragic grief when contemplating Zweig’s suicide. ‘I loved that man!’ he shrieks through floods of brine. ‘Why? Why?’ he bawls. ‘Why? Why?’ A character in a play might perhaps supply an answer rather than just repeating the question. And in Taking Sides when Furtwängler is forced to examine the consequences of conducting music for the Nazis, he wails, ‘It is not just! It is not fair!’ Yes. We know. Anything to add? Afraid not. Poor old Furtwängler vomits into a waste paper basket and exits the action. Not an illuminating climax.

There’s nothing really wrong with these plays. Harwood does the research, shapes the drama, and puts it on stage. But there’s no fire, daring, poetry or depth here. Are they dull? They’re certainly very beige.