Theater Abroad: Through a Twisted Glass

• Share

No mere stage work could be expected to evoke the tale of horror that issued from the trial of Adolph Eichmann. But in London last week, audiences reeling out of the St. Martin's Theater were convinced that they had experienced something like a surrealistically twisted version of the Eichmann affair. The play is The Man in the Glass Booth. The booth is a criminal's bulletproof dock, but the drama is anything but shatterproof.

The bizarre story, written by Playwright Robert Shaw,* is packed with comedy that is by turn bleak, black and breezy, but essentially it deals with identity: the identity of Jew and German, the persecuted and the persecutor, and of Christ as expiator. Arthur Goldman, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, has immigrated to New York, where he has become a real estate millionaire. A strangely mixed character he is: gross, vulgar, warm, arrogant, funny, zestful. He is also strangely troubled, apparently fearful that he is being pursued by a man named Dorff, who had been a Nazi SS colonel.

Pack 'Em In. The possibility arises that Goldman himself is Dorff, ironically, making a new life for himself as a Jew. "This isn't a rest cure," he barks at one point. "Back to work, scum. Nobody gets out except through the chimney!" Soon, a team of Israeli agents appears. They kidnap him and take him to Israel to stand trial.

He is a new man now. All the old Nazi arrogance surfaces. Asked if he is Jewish, he replies by describing a day of mass slaughter. "Am I Jewish? We light cigarettes, and we start the shooting. We fill up the bottom. They lay in from the top. The blood runs down from their heads. They lay in from the sides. We pack 'em more, and underneath there's movement . . . I'm a great packer, should have made trunks. Am I Jewish? . . . Just a day in my life. Just a clear day to enjoy forever. I don't know about my mother, but my father was pure-blooded Aryan."

Paean. Still, his personality maintains a subtle ambiguity. When his Jewish secretary visits him in his cell, he is Goldman/Dorff, switching characters with almost imperceptible changes in diction, accent, gesture. Back in the courtroom, he is Dorff again, exhorting the court —and the audience—with a great emotional paean to Hitler. "People of

Jewry," he cries. "Let me speak to you of my Fuhrer with love. He who answered our German need. He who res cued us from the depths . . . His power lay in the love he won from the people . . . Do I see you begin to raise your hands? Do I hear you stamp your feet. He gave us our history. He gave us our news. He gave us our art. He gave us our holidays, he gave us our leisure, and he gave our newly-married a copy of Mein Kampf. At the end we loved him . . . With the killers of the world at our throats, the hordes from the East and West, the capitalists and the Communists, the bombers of cities, the murderers of our children, with bullets in our guts we loved him." Then comes the big shocker: "People of Israel," he declares, "if he had chosen you—if he had chosen YOU—YOU also would have followed where he led!"