Who will speak truth to power? With the very idea of truth itself now under threat thanks to manipulation online and despotic power ascendant, Vanessa Redgrave’s new piece, illustrating the betrayal and collapse of socialist ideals within pre-Second World War Europe, provides a timely warning to, in the words of Thomas Mann, German novelist and 1929 Nobel Laureate for Literature, ‘build a dam against fascism’.  

With the aid of contemporary journals written by her uncle Nicholas, a midshipman in the Royal Navy in the mid 1930s, Redgrave begins to explore the political and social temperature of the day. Nicholas was to comment on the violent invasion of Abyssinia by Mussolini, in part aided by the ‘protracted deliberations’ of the British Government of the time. This would become a recurring theme – with Austria, then Czechoslovakia abandoned in supine attempts to reign in Hitler’s hand.

Running in tandem with harrowing tales of political capitulation and betrayal, Redgrave affectionately balances her story with personal tales of her family, centering mostly on her father Sir Michael Redgrave, himself a committed socialist – tracking his friendships with left-wing luminaries W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Stephen’s lover Tony Hyndman (also known as Jimmy Younger) and the American psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner who married Joseph Buttinger, leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists, instrumental in helping smuggle thousands of anti-Fascist refugees out of Europe at the time of the crackdown on the Socialist Party by Chancellor Dollfuss.

Presented in three distinct parts, there was as much sex as politics on the menu as Redgrave candidly discussed her father’s bi-sexuality, who then could have been jailed for his orientation. In one aside, Venessa fondly remembers, as a child, being kissed goodnight by the playwright and singer Noël Coward. Noël was one of many who fell under Michael Redgrave’s spell, telling his wife Rachel Kempson that he found her husband simply irresistible! Kempson was apparently well aware of the ambiguities of the man she married, and loved him, despite his affairs, in a marriage that lasted 50 years, producing three children.

In a format comprising part story-telling, part re-enactment, Redgrave led her trio of actors, Robert Boulter as Stephen Spender, Michael Redgrave and Nicholas Kempson; Lucy Doyle as Muriel Gardiner and Rachel Kempson; and Paul Hilton as Joe Buttinger, Koloman Wallisch, Corin Redgrave and Thomas Mann in an examination of what it was like to witness the breakdown of democracy in twentieth-century Europe. With no little irony, there was reference to the Austrian referendum on the Anschluss with Germany with echoes of recent experiences closer to home.

Boulter lent both Spender and Michael Redgrave a swagger, men seemingly comfortable in their conflicted sexuality. Delightful scenes were conjured between Spender and Gardiner (Lucy Doyle) as they fall for each other on the idyllic Adriatic coast.  Doyle re-enacts Gardiner’s dangerous mission to supply false passport to refugees from fascism in a world where everything, it seems, is on edge. This is the way things go when nothing is challenged. The Vienna of 1934, or ‘Red’ Vienna as it was sometimes referred to, had been a crucible for socialist ideals: affordable workers apartments, child education and sanitation, even washing machines provided for workers’ wives, sisters and mothers. That it was all destroyed within just a few days, Redgrave believes, should be a wake-up call to us all.

As a finale, Vanessa leaves us to an extraordinary retelling of Thomas Mann’s 1938 speech in New York, following Chamberlain’s appeasement with Nazi Germany. Paul Hilton gives a visceral performance as Mann dissecting Britain’s role in enabling the rise of fascism.

Redgrave, at 82, is upright and still fighting, on record as heavily criticising the exclusionary policy of the British government towards refugees. “The UK signed the Declaration of Human Rights. Now we have to employ lawyers to take the government to court to force them to obey the law. Just thinking about that makes my mind go berserk.”

One of the few who can snap us out of sleepwalking to servitude, an hour and a half with Vanessa Redgrave is never dull.    ★★★★☆      Simon Bishop   18^th July 2019

Photo by Nobby Clark