Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Chris Pybus, Eirek Bar, Giulia Rampons, Andrew Wall.

From out of the mist and the warm steam of the train that arrived in Liverpool in 1912 came a shudder, the feeling of a disease walking with the casual air of authority and frightened clash of Time as the supposed six months of Adolf Hitler’s time in Liverpool before World War One bore fruit a hundred years on.

For the Unity Theatre, a former synagogue in the heart of a city ravaged by war, ghosts of the dead may stir up many thoughts and in just one sweeping move of the play Adolf in Toxteth, the veins of blood turned still. It was a powerful and meaningful moment that was unfortunately perhaps taken to its full advantage throughput the performance.

Perhaps the problem arguably lay at the door of how after 70 years humanity views the evil that lay within the actions and thoughts of the man. It almost can be seen in some respects that we treat him as a joke, the bogie-man to have tales told from those that remember such things to generations that have simply gone past caring because they have not known the level of destruction that one such man can sow. The long argument often heard that it was so long ago and shouldn’t we try to forget and move on a by-word for it will rear its ugly head again we have become complacent in our supremacy.

It only takes inaction, it only takes self-satisfaction and the “I’m alright Jack” attitude to understand that one person in politics with a voice that sounds reasonable, calm, measured and full of bile and hatred to whip up anger in a country, it could even happen here in Britain. To treat arguably history’s most evil dictator as a joke is a dangerous precedent, he should be seen, as Chris Pybus captured most eloquently, as a man whose evil should send the probing tentacles of distaste and terror running down the spine.

For Chris Pybus this was a superb performance, one that really delved into the psychosis of a madman, of a terrible and frightening human being. His speech towards the end of the play truly gripped and turned the blood to ice, this was no joke; this was an exploration into a world and words of the damned.

Whilst the production could have utilised the relationship between the two men and the sister-in-law a lot more, perhaps even to the point where Bridget Hitler sought to use her connection to the madman in later life with her book for example, it still gave inkling into the world of insatiable insanity and rampant and unchecked egotism.

Adolf in Toxteth is a rare play that deals with the formation of thought that took the world to war.

Ian D. Hall