Richard
Golding (left) as John Amery |
AN
ENGLISH TRAGEDY
World
Premiere Play
Exposes Jew For Hitler
By Ivor Davis
and Sally Ogle Davis
 HE
curtain parts to reveal a stage in the shape of a huge swastika. There
is a perceptible gasp from the mostly older matinee audience in the
London suburb of Watford.
World War II is still the most vivid memory in most
of their lives and the Nazi symbol to them represents at the very least
nights spent under German bombardment from the skies, or worse.
Watford has a significant number of Jewish residents and
there are several synagogues in the area.
In an atmosphere of increasing British anti-Semitism and
vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric in the left wing press, the play, An
English Tragedy, couldn’t be timelier. Written by South
African/Jewish playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood
(The Pianist, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly,)
it is the story of John Amery, son of a cabinet minister who, along with
the infamous Lord Haw Haw, made propaganda radio broadcasts for the
Nazis into England.
His father Leo Amery was educated, along with his friend
Winston Churchill, at Harrow, one of the top English public schools, and
at Balliol College Oxford. He married Florence "Bryddie"
Greenwood, whose brother, Viscount Greenwood, sent the infamous Black
and Tans to Ireland. The Amerys were connected to anyone who was anyone
in the British establishment.
Following a predictable rise through the ranks of the
Conservative Party, the diminutive Leo, of whom it was said, "If he’d
been a foot taller and his speeches a half hour shorter he could have
been Prime Minister," became Secretary of State for India in
Churchill’s wartime cabinet.
The Amery’s first born John was bright, handsome,
charming but a problem from the moment he was born. He followed his
father to Harrow, but was expelled twice, his housemaster declaring him
the most abnormal boy he had ever encountered.
He developed a penchant for champagne, grand hotels,
fast cars and even faster women as well as men. At school in Switzerland
he told his tutor he financed his lifestyle by prostituting himself to
older men. He took his childhood teddy bear with him to nightclubs and
cafes, ordering drinks and food for the stuffed toy.
Evelyn Waugh may have used Amery as a model for the
character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, published a
decade later. Amery’s contemporaries described him having no sense of
right or wrong or the consequences of his actions.
He married three times — to prostitutes. To this point
the story of John Amery is not much different than that of a number of
aristocratic young British wastrels who inevitably drink and drug
themselves to an early death.
Jeremy Child
(left) as Leo Amery |
What makes John Amery different is that in the
mid-thirties he developed an interest in extreme right wing politics and
an obsession with Communists and Jews. Communism he believed was an
international plague carried by the Jews with the aim of bringing down
the British Empire and taking over the world.
He fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and
eventually came under the influence of the French fascist Jacques Doriot.
After he wrote violently pro Nazi letters to the French press, the
Germans realized that if they could parade the pro Nazi son of the
British aristocracy it would be a considerable feather in the Fuhrer’s
cap. Soon his parents had the dubious pleasure of listening to their son’s
voice beamed from Berlin into their stately British home.
And that’s where the play opens as the swastika shaped
stage—designed by Ralph Koltai, himself a Kindertransport refugee from
Berlin to England—divides to suggest the different locales where the
story plays out.
On November 19, 1942, the Amerys listen to their son’s
ranting. Under the infamous call letters, "Germany Calling, Germany
Calling," Amery proclaims, "Your patriotism is being exploited
by people who for the most part hardly have any right to be English.
Between you and peace lie only the Jew and his puppets."
His broadcasts were never as popular as those of Lord
Haw Haw (the Irish traitor William Joyce) and eventually the
Germans dropped them. Amery then visited British prison camps in German
where he tried to recruit the prisoners to join his self-styled Legion
of St. George to fight with the SS against the Soviets. He managed to
recruit a grand total of 57 men.
In the play, which could come to Broadway, the senior
Amery is terrified that his son’s treason will ruin his career, but
both Churchill and King George VI reassure him.
In 1945 on a visit to his hero Mussolini, John Amery was
captured by Italian partisans and sent to England for trial. He remained
sanguine throughout. "I don’t suppose for a moment they’ll
bring a charge against me," he boasted to his captors,
"but if they did of course my father would see to it."
And indeed his family tried everything in their power to
save him. His mother even petitioned the King. But after the war, in
September 1945, Churchill’s government fell and Leo Amery lost
his seat in parliament.
Nevertheless, Amery’s second son Julian, then an
officer in British Special Operations, later a member of Parliament,
went to Spain and returned with documents purporting to prove that John
had become a Spanish citizen and therefore immune to prosecution for
treason against Britain. At the same time a family-hired psychiatrist
pronounced him mentally incapable of knowing right from wrong.
The set of An
English Tragedy
|
Either defense might have worked but when John Amery
entered the courtroom on November 28, 1945, he stunned his family and
the court by pleading guilty, and was sentenced to death. The entire
proceedings lasted eight minutes.
It was this part of the story that intrigued playwright
Harwood. Why would John Amery, who considered himself not only innocent
but a patriot, suddenly plead guilty?
Harwood had originally heard the Amery story from his
friend, Dame Rebecca West, whose book The Meaning of Treason
dealt with both William Joyce and Amery. When he asked West for an
explanation of the guilty plea, she said Amery had done it to save his
parents embarrassment.
To Harwood this simply did not ring true. Amery had
shown absolutely no consideration for his parents throughout his life,
or desire to save them from the consequences of his behavior in any way.
So the writer began to dig. It wasn’t until 2001 that
he found documents which he believes explain the inexplicable.
That explanation forms the climax of the play. In his
prison cell, as his parents pay their last visit to him before his
hanging, John reveals that he knows the family big secret: Leo
Amery, proper English gentleman and pillar of the establishment was
born a Jew. His mother’s family was Hungarian Jewish intellectuals
from Budapest.
Leo, fearing that the truth would impede his rise
through the Conservative Party ranks, concealed his background even from
his own children. Now his ardently anti-Semitic son, having spent his
life believing in his upper crust, true blue English credentials, has
the perfect weapon for revenge. He will hang, leaving his parents with
an everlasting stigma and his father with the knowledge that his denial
of his heritage has produced the ultimate betrayal.
The final scene has Amery climbing the scaffold on
December 19, 1945.
"I have always wanted to meet you, Mr. Pierrepont,"
he told the famous hangman. "But not of course under these
circumstances."
An English Tragedy doesn’t answer the question of
when Jon Amery learned of his Jewish roots.
Was his virulent anti-Semitism and his pro-Nazi
activities an attempt to deny his own identity? Perhaps that knowledge
came later, turning his affection for his parents into the kind of
loathing that could cause him to choose death if it offered him the
chance to destroy the father who was responsible—as he saw it—for
giving him "the plague."
These questions and more may be answered as the play
undergoes further retooling before heading to London’s West End and
perhaps eventually to Broadway.
|
Cover
ITTING
through an electrifying performance in the theatre is a rare experience.
You will experience the joy of live entertainment, if you see this
Broadway revival of Gypsy, book by Arthur Laurents, music
by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, at the St.
James Theatre.
