Collaboration/Taking Sides/The Circle
Minerva Studio, Chichester/Chichester Festival Theatre

One day Ronald Harwood may once again write a script that is not centred on an individual’s relationship with Nazism. Harwood, best known now as the screenwriter of The Pianist, premiered a play about British Nazi sympathiser John Amery this year, and now Chichester has twinned a revival of his 1995 play about the de-Nazification interrogations of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, Taking Sides, with a new companion piece about composer Richard Strauss and his sometime librettist Stefan Zweig, Collaboration.

One of the spurious, desperate “evidences” of Nazi commitment flung by Furtwängler’s monomaniac American interrogator is that German state radio followed the news of Hitler’s death with the conductor’s recording of a Brückner symphony. We are implicitly directed to consider the absurdity of this as amounting to an ideological endorsement by Furtwängler, but we recognise how emotionally manipulative the music is. Harwood’s writing is similarly transparent: Michael Pennington may play Furtwängler as formal and reserved to the point of coldness but we are in no doubt that, however naive his beliefs about the separation of art and politics might be, we are on his side rather than that of David Horovitch as the proto-McCarthy determined to condemn him.