Kings Head

Four stars

It is April 2003 and an elderly and somewhat tired man is about to retire. He rises out of his office chair and tells us that he has been known as the Jewish James Bond. However, although he once broke a bottle over a Nazi’s head his work is mostly banal involving phone calls, applying for permits and filing. Lots of filing.

Twenty two thousand cases clog the in-box of Holocaust survivor-turned Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Each one concerns a war criminal who butchered sadistically or administered murderously, such as Eichmann who, as he stood accused in an Israeli dock, triggered in Wiesenthal an intense feeling of disappointment so ordinary and unimpressive was this pen-pusher.

“I wanted my monster,” says Wiesenthal who calculated that between him and his wife Cyla, 89 members of his family had been murdered by the Nazis.

Witten by American Tom Dugan, this one man show starring Christopher C Gibbs which is making its London premiere following an acclaimed run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, coveys the humanity and humility of a man devoted to bringing Nazis to justice.

“When I go home I feel ashamed,” he confesses. If his life is to mean anything it must be spent repaying the debt he feels to those who the Nazis murdered. The 6 million yes, but also the 5 million others. The Holocaust is after all a human tragedy, not only a Jewish one declares Wiesenthal.

Simon Wiesenthal in 1982

Such lessons will be familiar – perhaps tiresomely so - to many in the audience: that atrocity is perpetrated by people not monsters; that guilt should be individual, not collective, as must the stories of the Holocaust if the enormity is to be understood. Hence the importance of Anne Frank or Albert, the French eleven-year-old boy who knew he was about to die at the hands of the Nazis and so wrote the letter Wiesenthal discovered hidden in a book so that he might live in the mind of the person who found it. He did.

But to a generation who so freely use the word “genocide” Wiesenthal unwittingly sets the record straight about what the word used to mean – not the appalling casualties of war, but a deliberate annihilation in which children were shot so that their bodies could fill potholes in roads. Not that they will see this worthwhile show.