Theater Review: The Misfortune of the English and the End of the Night

The Misfortune of the English
Directed by Oscar Toeman
At the Orange Tree Theatre

The End of the Night
Directed by Alan Strachan
At Park Theatre

The horrors of Nazi Germany provide rich pickings for novelists, dramatists and filmmakers. So it is that the same week saw the launch of two new plays set in Germany in the years leading up to and including the Second World War. Both seek to use relatively unknown real events to tell original stories about the era, using outsiders’ perspectives to have us think afresh about the themes evoked by the setting. The End of the Night manages this triumphantly, but unfortunately The Misfortune of the English fails to live up to its initial promise.

Both plays show us foreigners entering Hitler’s Germany around the time of Hitler’s birthday, albeit nine years apart. Pamela Carter’s The Misfortune of the English, at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, is set in 1936, shortly after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland but before Hitler had revealed the full extent of his territorial ambitions. A London boys’ school are on a walking trip to the Black Forest, but what begins as a high-spirited cultural exchange becomes a nightmare as they wander into a blizzard. The End of the Night, meanwhile, written by Ben Brown and playing at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, takes us forward to the dying days of the Second World War in 1945, with Hitler in his bunker and the Battle of Berlin beginning. It’s set on the estate of Dr Felix Kursten, Heinrich Himmler’s masseur, where Himmler has agreed to meet Norbert Masur, a representative of the World Jewish Congress, to negotiate the potential release of some Jewish prisoners. In both plays, the key events are set out early – a lengthy hike through Germany, a visit to a country that has committed genocide against your people – and we are keen yet nervous to find out what happens to the protagonists.

The Misfortune of the English, with an empty stage in the four-sided Orange Tree, plunges us immediately into the interactions of a trio of 13- and 14-year-old schoolboys on holiday – their buttoned-up leader Harrison (Hubert Burton), the joker of the pack, Eaton (Vinnie Heaven), and Lyons (Matthew Tennyson), a reserved and inquisitive boy who feels himself an outsider because of his Jewishness. They are part of a wider group of 27 schoolboys, but these are the only three we ever meet. Initially, the small cast isn’t a problem. The schoolboys are well-differentiated while also all showing the same characteristics of self-confident aspirational, middle-class English masculinity. They quote Latin to each other and take pride in their rigorous classical education, reciting the school song and rolling off a litany of sporting metaphors – their interactions throughout seem natural as Oscar Toeman’s direction brings us into the world of the quintessential English private school.

Unfortunately, the strong group of actors are let down by a play that thinks it’s cleverer than it is, and seems to be undecided as to the best way of handling the source material. It could let the plot do the hard work, helped by Elliot Griggs’ lighting and an ominous fog that slowly envelops the auditorium creating the illusion of the storm, but the never-ending changes of tense and perspective combined with the innumerable metaphors cluttering every other sentence, make the narrative more convoluted and harder to follow than it needed to be. Alternatively, the play could draw out the quirks of the characters and their attitudes towards the blizzard when it comes – should they grit their teeth and push on with a stiff upper lip, or should they turn back and admit defeat but live to fight another day? – but no attempt is made to develop their personalities until far too late, and the lack of interaction with any other actors means we never leave their insular world. They speak about the Germans they encounter, and about their inspirational teacher, but we never see this first-hand. This means that its treatment of Nazi Germany is only surface level, and it tries to make Englishness the key theme instead. For a play set in Nazi Germany to be intent on picking flaws in Englishness seems, at the very least, misguided. But it could be done, and done well in a way that sheds light on both Nazi Germany and Englishness, by showing the clash of cultures and the interactions between people from both countries. How would the schoolboys’ abstract thoughts on fascism have changed in conversation with Germans? How would Lyons’ perspective on the world have been affected? We never find out, because we never see it happen. This is especially baffling given that we hear a play on Kipling’s famous ‘what do they know of England, who only England know’ line. The perils of trying to do too much are only too clear in this play – in allowing itself to be torn in different directions, it becomes incoherent and fails to give us a compelling plot, or characters, or themes.

In contrast, The End of the Night plays things by the book and succeeds by keeping it simple. We spend two nights with Masur (Ben Caplan) as he attempts to convince Himmler that it’s in his best interests to facilitate the release of Jewish prisoners to Sweden. It’s a remarkable story, and told here in a manner that interrogates Nazism and its supporters. From the beginning, we wonder whether Masur will succeed, and how he’ll interact with Himmler. Can he let the past stay in the past, as Kursten urges, or will his anger at the Holocaust prevent him from securing some releases? How does it feel to attempt to save, perhaps, a few thousand lives when multiple millions have already been killed? There is also the question throughout of Kursten’s loyalty, making him the most interesting character. He’s able to coordinate this meeting by maintaining friendly relations with both the World Jewish Congress and the Nazi regime, but whose side is he on? The play is straightforwardly plot-driven, but the absence of never-ending changes of tense and perspective makes it far deeper in practice than The Misfortune of the English with the characters caught in complex webs of identity, morality and loyalty.

The interactions between Himmler and Masur are when this play is at its strongest. Masur appears emotionally bereft, committed to this attempt to help prisoners while conscious of the atrocities that he has been and will be unable to prevent. When Himmler appears on the scene and interacts with the reticent Masur, the German asserts his dominance through maintaining eye contact but he becomes a different person completely when it is just him and Kursten. He opens up, and we get to see Himmler the human being rather than Himmler the public figure. The tension is amped up through the quiet isolation of Michael Pavelka’s country house set, Jason Taylor’s gloomy lighting and the sudden noises of cars, ringing telephones and bombs that break the silence in Gregory Clarke’s sound design. While the denouement is slightly underwhelming, it is still affecting, bringing a number of the audience to tears. What a contrast to The Misfortune of the English, a play that does not make us feel or think and lacks in dramatic tension.

Both these plays had potential, bringing remarkable true stories to the stage from a setting that lends itself to studies of the human condition, and of good and evil. The Misfortune of the English stumbles, however, by trying to do so much that it ends up doing very little, becoming too incoherent too often to make its audience feel much at all. The End of the Night, on the other hand, demonstrates why dramatists are still so drawn to Nazi Germany. What could become a cliched tale of somebody doing good against a backdrop of unmitigated evil becomes an affecting and thought-provoking play about humanity and the importance of remaining hopeful, no matter your circumstances.

The Misfortune of the English is playing at the Orange Tree Theatre from 25 April to 28 May 2022. The End of the Night is playing at Park Theatre from 27 April to 28 May 2022.

-Christopher Day is currently a PhD student at the University of Westminster.