The Long Shadow of Alois Brunner review – tense mystery of a missing writer and a Nazi fugitive
The flight of Nazis including Adolf Eichmann to hideouts in Latin America after the second world war is well documented. Mudar Alhaggi’s drama tells of one SS officer who flew east instead, but comes at his life story obliquely.
We hear how Alois Brunner, known as Eichmann’s right-hand man, settled in Damascus and apparently became a security adviser to the president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad. He is drawn as something of a state-sponsored fugitive who, ideologically, brought a piece of the Third Reich with him as he helped to develop Syria’s intelligence system, with its modern-day torture methods.
Performers Mohammad Alrashi and Wael Kadour, both exiled Syrians, narrate his life but also the difficulties around dramatising it. Produced by Collective Ma’louba, this is ostensibly a play in search of a play. We are told that its writer, Alhaggi, has now gone missing and the scraps of his script are what the actors piece together before us.
It is beguilingly naive – the actors tell us they will speak and move slowly, the surtitles translating their Arabic into English never leaving us behind. It is simply staged, too, with a table and chairs rearranged to fit scenes in Syria and Germany. But there is craft in Omar Elerian’s direction, which builds intrigue while keeping an air of improvisation.
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The two actors play out flashes of Brunner’s life – as a gruff figure in hospital, or an irascible old man railing against Lenin and democracy in a video rental shop – but they weave this with the story of their vanished writer. Why has he disappeared? Is the ghost of Brunner stalking him? At times, it verges on postmodern noir.
Uncertainty sits at the core of a tense show in which you are not always sure who is speaking. Questions around both men’s lives hang in the air, holding their mysteries as Alhaggi attempts to gets closer to Brunner.
Their biographical details are combined and sometimes the writer seems to morph into the Nazi. This parallel is confounding at first, but slowly we see how the terrorised are forced, always, to see themselves in relation to their oppressor, although here it also leads to a vague metaphor for the exiled writer’s process. “What remains of theatre when you do not have a language and lack an audience?” asks one actor.
• At Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 23 March
