Word: haider
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Haider (Alan Howard) is a kind of academic Walter Mitty. But unlike Thurber's daydreamer, Haider has fantasies of failure, doubt and dread. Something dreadful does actually happen to him, and the question-and-answer core of the late British playwright C.P. Taylor's play is how and why. How does a seemingly decent, liberal-minded man like Haider, who lectures on the German classics at the University of Frankfurt, and whose best friend Maurice (Joe Melia) is a Jewish psychoanalyst, wage a retreat from conscience that finds him at Auschwitz as the right-hand man of Adolf...
Taylor takes the tack that Haider is a victim of flattery, subtle intimidation and an inordinate love of the uniform. Out of the emotional stress accompanying his mother's senile dementia, Haider has written a pro-euthanasia novel. It conies to the Fuhrer's attention, and Haider admits to "the surge of pride in me! Reading that scrawled sentence in Adolf s shaky hand-It said: 'Written from the heart...
...Haider's father-in-law suggests that he join the party, and he does. A major in the SS and an old World War I buddy (Pip Miller) suggests that he join the Nazi officer elite corps and he does. As a member of the SS he could secure the tickets to Switzerland for which Maurice pleads, but he is, by now, too self-intimidated...
...might be possible to care more about Haider and his plight if he were not such a typically alienated antihero. The hero of the evening is Alan Howard. His is a meticulously stylized performance and a memorable display of the actor's craft. Howard's array of arid classroom gestures and pinched facial nerves is matched by a voice that barks, chokes, melts and freezes. And when he does a close-to-floor-level, slow-motion goose-step, the monstrous history of the Third Reich seems to be marching past...