THEATER REVIEW
TAKEN AT MIDNIGHT By Mark Hayhurst Translated by Dori Parnes Directed by Moshe Kepten Habima, July 20
Been there. Done that. No, I’m not being flippant, the reverse actually; but for us, everything to do with the Holocaust is so searing that we have to take a deep breath, both literally and figuratively, before we can even begin to tackle it.
Taken at Midnight concerns Hans Litten (Ran Danker), a real-life attorney who, during a notorious trial in 1931, put Adolf Hitler in the witness box and made verbal mincemeat of him.
“Revenge is a dish best eaten cold” says the adage, and when the nasty little corporal came to power in 1933 he had Litten arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire. Serially brutalized, sent from camp to camp to camp, Litten evaded his captors at the end by committing suicide at Dachau in 1938.
But Taken at Midnight is really about Litten’s indomitable mother, Irmgard (Gila Almagor), who took on the regime in fruitless attempts to free her son, and this is where that deep breath comes in.
Mark Hayhurst has written a brilliant, uncomfortable play about the price paid for courage, and perhaps I’m putting it there, perhaps it’s deliberate and perhaps it’s inevitable, but
Taken at Midnight has about it a sense of foreknowledge that nudges at our apprehension of the play, lessens the impact even.
That said, everything about this production is workmanlike, unsentimental, including the actors.
After an initial glitch which had them reciting rather than speaking their lines, with a few too many pregnant pauses, they leaned into their roles.
Almagor’s fine, understated, deliberately undemonstrative Irmgard is a middle-class hausfrau whose determination to free her son holds her stiff. Almagor’s Irmgard can’t relax. Her body stutters, except for one transcendental moment when she’s allowed to touch her son. We believe her.
The more Danker’s Hans holds on to that irreducible spark the more physically broken he becomes. Litten’s role is difficult because he can’t become pathetic, and Danker manages to avoid that. As SS Dr. Conrad Ido Bartal is urbane, conceals his gleeful thug with courtesy, flashing out only once when he snarls with hate toward Hans.
Michael Koresh provides a dithery Fritz (Hans’ dad) Litten, Shmil Ben-Ari a truculent, rash Muhsem, Amnon Wolf the more fearful Ossietzky (both Hans’ fellow prisoners), and Tomer Sharon is nicely useless as the pacifist Lord Clifford.
Frida Klapholtz’ clautrophobic grey brick cellar looms nastily. Polina Adamov’s 1930s costuming is quietly apt and Yosef Bardanashvili’s music thrums in the gut. For those who don’t or won’t know,
Taken at Midnight is a revelation. For me it was, just a bit, déjà vu.