And ultimately it’s this synthesis – or lack of it – with Anderson’s own cultural commentary that’s the clash of the

And, ultimately, it’s this synthesis – or lack of it – with Anderson’s own cultural commentary that’s the clash of the piece. At the end, when she kneels at the foot of the stage and, accompanying herself on a keyboard, addresses the “loose fish” of image, desire and America. It’s a moving, simple gesture – the heart of Songs and Stories – but it comes too late to resolve the strands of the sea-tale.. Well, did he or didn’t he? Did Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Minister of Armaments, know what was happening in the concentration camps? It seems unbelievable he didn’t. In Dolly West’s Kitchen (at the Old Vic), set near the seaside in Ireland during the war, Dolly West’s mother seems to have a pretty shrewd idea of what was happening to the Jews in Poland. Yet just up from the Old Vic, the National is presenting a three and a half hour play, Albert Speer, in which Hitler’s right-hand man maintains that he didn’t actually know about the Holocaust Our first instinct has to be, come off it. Well, did he or didn’t he? Did Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Minister of Armaments, know what was happening in the concentration camps? It seems unbelievable he didn’t.

In Dolly West’s Kitchen (at the Old Vic), set near the seaside in Ireland during the war, Dolly West’s mother seems to have a pretty shrewd idea of what was happening to the Jews in Poland. Yet just up from the Old Vic, the National is presenting a three and a half hour play, Albert Speer, in which Hitler’s right-hand man maintains that he didn’t actually know about the Holocaust. Our first instinct has to be, come off it.
In 1995 Gitta Sereny published Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth. After famously adapting 900 pages of Nicholas Nickleby for Trevor Nunn at the RSC, David Edgar has now adapted 700 pages of Sereny’s Albert Speer for Nunn at the National.

With a cast of more than 50 characters, there is one notable absentee That is Sereny herself. Edgar’s adaptation eschews the cool, relentless, inquisitorial tone of the book for something necessarily theatrical and, at times, positively operatic It is no evening for minimalists. This powerful, demanding piece of work advances on a daunting number of fronts.We open with Alex Jennings, as the elderly Speer, having a nightmare about getting hanged at Nuremberg. Then we flash back to the moment he arrived at Spandau for his 20-year prison sentence. Here, Speer meets a priest, Casalis, and together they start a long journey of soul-searching. We go back to Speer as the student architect, and then progress with Jennings making the changes from jackets, ties and dark suits into leather overcoats and military cap, as Speer moves from rising figure in the local Nazi party, to redoing Goebbels’s flat, to meeting Hitler, designing Germania, accompanying him to Paris in 1940 and taking over as Head of Armaments.

Act One is the Career Reviewed, with the questioning priest – played with searching intelligence by Jonathan Cullen – moving in and out of the action.Edgar, Nunn and designer Ian McNeil craft these scenes with bravura, accomplishing numerous transitions between localities with dazzling economy and assurance. (The stage crew ought to have taken a curtain call of their own.) En route, we encounter enough plot-lines to furnish half a dozen plays. There’s Speer’s chilly relationship with his father (vividly played by William Gaunt). There’s Speer’s relationship with his brother – whose life he declines to save. Most of all, there’s the big passion of Speer’s life: his relationship with Hitler. Roger Allam’s Hitler bounds into the Chancellory apartments, talking of plaster, ceiling mouldings and the glazing on the windows “When is this happening?” he demands. Allam’s Hitler tells jokes, transfixes people with stares and remembers the names of Speer’s children.

With Speer, he finds the ultimate Can-Do man: an optimist and logician. For the first half of the play, Alex Jennings’s tall patrician Speer is slightly outshone by Hitler’s dynamic, explosive presence. After the interval, in a series of superb scenes Jennings moves centre-stage.The first comes in the prison yard at Spandau, where in a single scene Jennings takes us through 20 years of imprisonment as he walks round the world in his imagination. His return to his family (some of whom he fails to recognise) is exquisitely pitched. So is the sudden freezing of the faces at the meal table when Speer announces to them all that he will write his memoirs. The pulse of the play comes from his doomed attempt to square his relationship with the people in the past with those in the present.In the second half Jennings matches old world manners and stooped figure with an upper class drawl which ages across the evening. As Speer narrows down, Jennings dramatically deepens his portrayal till his character reaches an extreme point of anguish.