Taking Sides - Malvern Theatres (From Tewkesbury Admag)

Taking Sides - Malvern Theatres

The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

Churchill, as ever, summed it up perfectly. And in this agonising drama two men tortured by the dilemmas of war battle, in effect, for the hearts and minds of the audience.

Neil Pearson is Major Steve Arnold, an American haunted by visions of the liberated concentration camps. His task in post-war Berlin is to uncover how deeply the noted composer and conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler was involved with the Nazi regime.

The writer Ronald Harwood, in this brilliant, tense and disturbing play, gives us no answers. Because there are none and we are left with only the image of war as a destroyer of souls as well as bodies.

Neil Pearson, known to TV millions for his flip characters in Drop the Dead Donkey and Between the Lines, proves that he can play personalities of greater depth and sophistication while maintaining a tortured, chain-smoking energy as the major.

Julian Glover as the real-life Furtwngler, a man facing the eternal dilemmas of life under a brutal dictatorship, is a towering and dignified presence in the face of Arnold's prejudicial interrogation.

REVIEW BY STEVE EVANS