No questions asked

Berlin Hanover Express
Hampstead

Invasion!
Soho

When TV writers turn to the stage there’s often a suspicion of fly-tipping, of rejected ideas being dumped in the hope that others will tidy them away. Ian Kennedy Martin, creator of The Sweeney, has come up with a cracking theme. Berlin, 1942. Two Irish diplomats grapple with the conflict between their country’s neutrality and the emerging evidence of the holocaust. To compound the dilemma, the beautiful cook at the Irish embassy is a covert Jewess being investigated by the Gestapo. But it all goes wrong in the details.

The diplomats are unlovable misfits. O’Kane, played by Owen McDonnell, is a debt-ridden loudmouth who drinks claret for breakfast and boasts endlessly about his father’s friendship with de Valera. His boss Mallin (Sean Campion) is the geometric opposite, a priggish workaholic who hunches forlornly over his typewriter, like a mourner over a coffin, and who is less interested in a million murders than in proof-reading his latest memo to Dublin. Their contrasted attitudes to the genocide feel contrived and schematic. Worse, the love interest has been botched. One or perhaps both Irishmen should fall for the bombshell cook but Mallin’s too busy polishing his rubber stamp and O’Kane is oddly reluctant to play Romeo, so it’s left to a fat Nazi twit (whose name Kollvitz sounds like a lazy echo of Colditz) to move in on her. When a sweating Gestapo officer corners a terrified Jewish beauty we all know what happens next.

To be fair, their twisted encounter ends in a scene of extraordinary erotic power as the cook slowly sheds her leaves like an artichoke, while the drooling voyeur hungrily snaps her on his spy-camera. Quite what this adds to the play’s moral issues isn’t entirely clear but Isla Carter’s sensational nudity, fresh and luscious as whipped cream, is its own justification.