Tosca’s Kiss

The missus and myself went to the Orange Tree in Richmond to see Tosca’s Kiss at the weekend.

Written by Kenneth Jupp, the play is set in 1946 and follows reporter Rebecca West as she covers the Nuremburg Trials and, in particular, the case of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's economics minister whose fiscal skill ensured Nazi Germany had the financial clout to become a fearsome war machine.

It’s a four-hander with the characters West and Schacht joined by Tom Morton, Schacht's American prosecutor, and Francis Biddle, the American judge in charge of the case. Between these four is played out a personal drama as the reporter and the judge have an affair and a morality play as Morton and Schacht fight it out in court.

The first half needs a bit of script work as some of the dialogue is a bit clunky and a bit 1940s B&W movie melodrama. It’s light though not sharp. But the second half picks up pace when the moral meat of the play gets picked over. Can a banker and economist be blamed for the horrors that his system helped create?

The Nuremburg judges thought not and Schacht got off – then went to work in the US helping build their economy in the wake of World War Two.

It’s an engaging play – and with Bush handing out contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq before the invasion proper had started – it’s a timely play. Balancing the cost of human lives and public opinion against realpolitik and the clout of money men and industrialists is an all-too current dilemma. Just ask Mr Blair…