Word: hochhuth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lord Chamberlain concentrate on his other duties, such as arranging Buckingham Palace garden parties and caring for the royal swans. In London's West End, arrangements are now being made to bring back such once banned plays as Jean-Claude van Itahe's America Hurrah and Rolf Hochhuth's Soldiers. "We are at last released from the tyranny of the theatrical leaseholder," says Osborne dryly. "There will probably be a quick rash of hairy American filth, but it shouldn't threaten the existence of cheerful, decent, serious British filth...
Churchill hunting is in season. Rolf Hochhuth's play Soldiers accused Winnie of conniving to kill off a troublesome ally, and of provoking air raids on Britain so that he could retaliate with mass bombings on German cities (TIME, May 10). Now Author Thompson, a British journalist turned war historian, says that Churchill, to save his own skin, fashioned a hero out of a so-so soldier named Bernard Law Montgomery. This will be news to those who have always felt that Field Marshal Montgomery alone was responsible for that singular achievement...
...dramatist, Hochhuth is arid and windy, substituting rhetoric for dialogue and debate for conflict. The drama is brought in from offstage like an imported delicacy-dispatches about the sinking of the Scharnhorst, or the discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, or telegrams from F.D.R. and Stalin...
Onstage, an incessant talkfest drones on about the methods and morality of war-all of it aimed at justifying Hochhuth's conviction that mass bombing should be prohibited by international law. Much of the time, Lord Cherwell (Joseph Shaw) confers with Churchill on the best tactics to follow. Cherwell, Churchill's friend and wartime scientific adviser, is presented as an eminence noire who, with a kind of icy diaholism, determined the Prime Minister's policies on both Sikorski and mass bombings. This again is at distinct variance with the historical record...
...even cadences like waves beating on the shore. Many of the words he is given to say, however, seem in closer accord with der Führer Prinzip than with bluff British pragmatism. Never for a moment is the playgoer unaware that this is a Teutonic Churchill and that Hochhuth is still playing the blame game-not so much to prod the consciences of other men as to slough off on them part of the German burden of guilt for the holocausts of war and genocide...