TAKEN AT MIDNIGHT

Taken At Midnight is the true story of Hans Litten, a brilliant young lawyer who in 1931 subpoenaed rising star Adolf Hitler to testify in a Berlin court, at a collective murder trial of some storm troopers. Litten, a dedicated anti-Nazi, ran rings around Hitler, exposing his total disregard for the rule of law and his use of organised violence. Two years later Hitler, by then in power, had him thrown into jail.

Litten was horribly tortured. His mother Irmgard, an aristocratic woman married to a professor, made it her mission to get him released. Her main channel was through a courteous Gestapo chief who allowed her several private interviews that form the backbone of Mark Hayhurst’s play, based on his previous TV drama.

As Irmgard, Penelope Wilton gives much the same performance as she does in Downton Abbey, only here she has Nazis and not Maggie Smith to contend with. Her grief is hidden by a rigid deportment as she badgers the vain Gestapo officer (John Light in the full creepy black uniform) whose phoney concern temporarily props up her hopes.

Martin Hutson is terrific as the brave Litten, physically ruined but ironical to the last. His jail scenes with two other prominent civilian cellmates are a bit implausible, but his physical deterioration through the play as he is transferred from camp to camp is hideous to watch. The intervention of a sleek British peer (David Yelland) proves futile and poor Irmgard fights on alone, her husband (Allan Corduner) offering only very wobbly moral support. Fierce as a tiger in her doomed mission, she quavers but never breaks. You know Litten’s fate is sealed when his father’s Jewish blood is referred to by the Gestapo officer.

Directed by Jonathan Church with a suitably eerie starkness, this is the fascinating but bleak story of how one haughty, intelligent and very brave woman took on the Third Reich armed with nothing but a deep maternal instinct and a glare of steely determination.

Until 1 November at Minerva Theatre, Oaklands Park, Chichester: 01243-781312, www.cft.org.uk