The “banality of evil” is a phrase that in today’s increasingly secular and media-driven world has begun to become almost overused. When Hannah Arendt coined the term, she applied it to Adolf Eichmann, as a means of contrasting the comportment of one of the chief architects of the Nazi Holocaust to him manifesting as something of a quiet bureaucrat. But it’s in action that the phrase’s true meaning becomes clear, which is both the beauty and the horror of Loring Mandel’s Conspiracy.
Based on Mandel’s theatrical reworking of his own script for the joint HBO/BBC Film production, this stage version is brought to stage by Strawmoddie with a 16-strong cast and an indulgent Fringe runtime of an hour and a half. Following the details of the only surviving transcript, it details the real-life meeting in Wannsee of a group of German high command officials, soldiers and lawyers to settle once and for all the “Question of the Jewish Problem”. Under the supervision and the vice-like grip of Reinhard Heydrich and his right-hand man Eichmann, they batter out the logistics and methodology of the Holocaust and the subsequent industrialised slaughter of six million Jews.
Staged much like a board meeting, the show exemplifies the horror of the situation precisely through the banality of it all. The egotistic personalities, the petty squabbling over prestige as well as importance of offices and spheres of influence, even the casual black humour over the methods of involuntary sterilisation all feels disturbingly human. But more than that, it’s the boredom on the faces of some of the men, the tedious, persnickety going over minute details of paperwork, the feeling that what we are seeing is, in many ways, just a dull corporate meeting offsets the grimness and the fantasticality so often applied to real-life figures that history rightly accords the title of monsters.
It’s a brilliantly tight script, and the cast roundly rise to each role, pulling the audience this way and that, searching desperately for someone to cling to, that someone here might somehow put a stop to this madness. But the inevitability of it plays out like a sickly inverted 12 Angry Men, as one by one, through flattery, coercion or promises, everyone falls in line under Heydrich’s sway. As the thunderous rapping on knuckles on the table repeatedly shows throughout, this old boys club will see their wickedness through, and for much of the runtime, it’s easy enough to forget this is even a play.
By the close and the final moments, as Schubert mournfully yet beautifully laments in the background and after each of the fine cast stands to explain their character’s eventual fate, it’s right that they left having taken no bows. The applause echoes out to an empty stage, a tribute to this brilliantly told warning from history and not to the very human monsters it portrays.