Dominic CAVENDISH
T★★★★★ he Amazon Prime series The Man in The High Castle – based on the 1962 Philip K Dick novel – memorably envisages a US that succumbed, at least in the east and mid-west, to the Nazi jack boot. But intimations of a victorious Third Reich could be found for real a short train ride from Manhattan in the 1930s.
Starring two of our brightest young actors, Patsy Ferran and Luke Thallon, Camp Siegfried, by American playwright Bess Wohl, revisits the chilling and shaming fact that a youth summer camp of that name – fostering Nazi indoctrination – ran between 1936 and 1941 in Yaphank on Long Island.
And it wasn’t unique. Organised for those of German descent, it sounds like a cross between boot camp and Butlin’s – a lot of outdoor sports, rousing speeches and sexual activity, the better to bring about the kind of volk who would see off the Bolsheviks and combine the American way with Deutschland uber alles. There were even streets named after Hitler and Goebbels. It got closed, natürlich, in 1941.
Wohl – who alighted on the subject by chance, holed up nearby during the pandemic – might be seen to have bagged a gift of a dramatic subject. But there are challenges: how to convey the euphoria of the experience without endorsing it, how to signal what those activities represented without arming the characters with hindsight – plus, in logistical terms, who gets included in this distilled act of social history.
Whereas the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit
could show a 10-year-old in a Hitler Youth camp, theatre thrives when it gets its audience’s imagination working. It also has a tight budget. So, in an act of daring minimalism, Wohl alights on two archetypal teens, an unnamed boy and girl, charting their growing, darkening relationship.
Director Katy Rudd presents the pair on a fairly stark stage, long narrow strips insinuating woodland behind them. There are ambivalent sounds; are those fireworks or explosives? There’s also some hard-to-glean period newsreel footage.
Thanks to this concentration, they brilliantly lay bare the vulnerability, affirmation-need, lust for life and worldly ignorance upon which the pro-nazi organisers preyed. Living under the dictatorship of hormones, these youngsters don’t know who they are. Which means, as the summer of 1938 progresses, Wohl can ambush us by showing sides to their nature that surprise us, testing our sympathies, blurring the line between forgivable naivety and irredeemable Nazism. What they’re told and how the camp operates is left out; it’s as if it seeps into their systems by osmosis.
Both Ferran and Thallon are superlative in marking the staging posts of the pair’s sexual awakening, ideological corruption and psychological turmoil. Ferran holds the eye as a 16-year-old of comical gawky reticence. With his hearty talk of “Kampfgeist”, Thallon supplies handsome brawn, with a side order of nervy solicitousness. Their flirtation – conducted at first over loud oompah music and attended by a cloud of insecurities – envelops them, and us.
Some lurches in behaviour – his towards violent savagery, hers towards a rapt submission before a deified Führer – bear a hint of authorial manipulation. His furtive masturbating as she intones forceful lines in German feels like a crude step too far.
Yet, overall, their journey from summer of love to world of hate feels transfixingly plausible. The grim moment in a speech to camp when Ferran’s wallflower blossoms into a familiar, tirading figure has you questioning who you thought she was, and what all of us are capable of doing.