Defying Hitler and Stalin’s Favourite: Preview
Feb 22 2012 | Written by lexiewilson

Ahead of this week’s performances at the Old Rep Theatre (to get 2 for 1 tickets simply quote ‘redbrick offer’ at the box office, or enter promo code ‘redbrick’ online) Redbrick Arts speaks to Theatre Unlimited’s artistic director Rupert Wickham. Performed as monologues, both Defying Hitler and Stalin’s Favourite are true stories about real people. Despite grappling with the same themes, the two plays are very different in tone.

Defying Hitler is about a young man growing up in a Germany on the peripheries of World War Two. Wickham believes it offers an intriguing and candid perspective on an event well documented in both history and literature. The performance is based on the memoirs of Sebastian Haffner, published posthumously by his son, and examines what it is like to be a child in a society on the brink of insurmountable change.

Stalin’s Favourite, on the other hand, is about a writer propelled to stardom in Soviet Russia after writing a sentimental poem in the War who became shoe horned into a role Wickham describes as a ‘cultural frontman’. The play is ‘an exploration of the implications of being in the front line.’  They are ‘very simply told’, working with ‘the power of empathy’ to give the audience something to latch on to.

The idea of the performances is to offer the audience an opportunity to experience history from a personal perspective, and thus making it less dry. Wickham tells me that the aim of these plays is threefold: to engage with the tradition of aural history; the tradition of story telling and the power of theatre, things which he argues passionately are vitally important and decaying within contemporary society.

Equally, in these productions, Theatre Unlimited are keen to try and rebuke the sense among the public that theatre is innately an ‘alien, middle-class medium’. Wickham makes it clear that Defying Hitler and Stalin’s Favourite expect that through the ‘immediacy of drama’, the audience will wind up emotionally involved with the action, forging a ‘personal connection’ to these monumental moments. Because, after all, ‘we need to learn from the mistakes of history.’

To find out more about their current productions, or the companies ethos, see theatreunlimited.org

Written by lexiewilson on Feb 22 2012. Filed under Arts, Key Stories, Preview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry