The cast of White Rose. Photo Marc Brenner.With all that’s wrong (and ultra right wing) with the world right now (try saying that after a couple of schnapps), it’s all too easy to believe that a creative’s response should be to write about it. Even better apparently, if that creative is able to assemble a team around them, which collectively settles upon a subject with the potential to layer the modern situation with awful historical parallels. Here, a barely disguised warning against modern Trumpian Fascism is delivered by reliving the perils of standing-by when a politician’s fanaticism takes hold. Hitler’s Nazi Germany proves an altogether apt comparison and we learn that it was the powerless young student writers of the White Rose who took it upon themselves to stand against tyranny when others turned a blind eye or were simply too scared to resist.
Brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl (Tobias Turley and Collette Guitart) find themselves compelled by events, to use their voices against the Nazis’ ever more deranged policies. Hans and his close friends have already experienced the horrors of the front line, whilst Sophie is forthright and determined to expose the creeping, insidious villainy she see all around her. A university professor Kurt Huber (Mark Wiltshire) urges caution but eventually joins the band of student writers which includes Willi Graf (Owen Arkrow) and Christoph Probst (Danny Whelan) who acquire a mimeograph printer and begin distributing leaflets as a means to encourage opposition and dissent. Meanwhile Sophie’s former boyfriend Frederick Fischer (Ollie Wray) has become a party apparatchik and dreams of reigniting their romance despite blotting his copy book by wearing a uniform adorned with a swastika.
At a point during the performance, Flugblütter (flying pieces of paper) are throw above the audience and flutter down for later reading. On these sheets are printed translations of the various leaflets which were distributed by the group from Munich University campus and beyond. They encourage ordinary citizens, true German patriots, to rise up and disrupt the Nazi war machine and put an end to Hitler’s rule.
It is all massively commendable and earnest stuff, with a banging onstage accompaniment (albeit from behind screens) which delivers a vital energy to composer Natalie Brice’s often wistful yet thumping rock-operaesque songs. Her collaborator Brian Belding, who is credited with being creator, book writer and lyricist, has a less successful time of things, with clunky dialogue and some wholly uninspiring lyric contributions to his name.
Of the songs, only the penultimate Who Cares, entirely hits the right chord. It’s a quite wonderful duet between brother and sister prior to their sentencing, which best spotlights the writing credentials and superb harmonics which are sporadically evident throughout the production but which are never sufficiently consistent to salvage this overwrought and uncomfortably overplayed piece (look out for Thomas Sutcliffe’s moment as a waspishly sibilant judge).
Perhaps most responsible for clutching defeat from the jaws of victory, is Will Nunziata’s direction, which is devoid of originality and leaves cast members exposed and dependent on sheer bravado to disguise awkward, static interludes. Understandably, the actors compensate in these moments by oversinging and overacting. In stark contrast, Ms Guitart manages to retain an unnerving stillness and expressionlessness whenever anyone else is singing or speaking nearby. Perhaps this is a professional courtesy learned during her time in Six, or maybe a conscious antidote to the excess of onstage facial mugging which surrounds her.
One chap who has recently returned from the front, flips his zeitung and exclaims with barely subdued pathos “Stalingrad, it’s really bad”. It would be impossible to encapsulate the production any more succinctly, so I simply won’t bother trying.
