Review of A Thing of Beauty – Imogen Stubbs is radiant as roasted Nazi preacher Leni Riefenstahl | platform

SSince Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon” 20 years ago, there have been articles about famous TV interviews – James Graham’s “The Best of Enemies”, Doug Wright’s “Good Night”, an Oscar, and a TV drama about Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew. A play about Michael Parkinson’s studio bouts with Muhammad Ali is being prepared.

Now A Thing of Beauty by Wendy Oberman and Jonathan Lewis imagines Leni Riefenstahl, director of Hitler’s propaganda films (Triumph Of The Will) and lover of rumours, in London in 1972 to speak to the BBC. Or partly imagine: I did a program with the company that year, although the interviewer was the great journalist and playwright Keith Dewhurst, not Harry Adams, as he is on stage, an alcoholic womanizer with a dark personal shame, which playwrights supposedly invented to allow for historical falsifications such as Adams’s astonishing transgression of moral boundaries.

One of the attractions of showbiz interviews is that they channel the pivotal moment in the current genre of crime fiction: the interrogation of a suspect. In cases like Riefenstahl’s – Nazis who stuck to their profession in the postwar period – television depositions became an alternative to legal questioning.

Imogen Stubbs is sensational as Riefenstahl – feisty and flirtatious, but above all ingeniously evasive. The performance shows how the screen genius was an expert at self-propaganda, knowing that Adams hopes to lure her into a pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic trap, so he uses every trick to belittle and lure him. When Riefenstahl speaks for the first time in the formal interview – Stubbs carefully distinguishes between public and private persona – there is a chill as profound as when the fugitive, elderly Hitler addresses the audience in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of George Steiner’s novel The Portage to San Cristobal Of A.H. (certainly due to the Renaissance).

“A Thing of Beauty” has a television rhythm of short scenes divided by musical stings (live cello from Una Lothar). The world of British television at its peak – tyrannical executives, perfectionist technicians, young women as perks to their boss – feels real, with great supporting work from Tony Bell as jaded TV star Adams and Sophie McMahon as era-standard target practice for misogynists.

It is worth noting that BBC One was planning to free up a prime time slot for the chat, while the real-life unrepentant Nazis – Riefenstahl, Albert Speer, Winifred Wagner – were usually on BBC Two, where they sometimes seemed to be punctuating a game of snooker. Speer, Hitler’s city planner, died while in London during his final inquest on Newsnight.

Their appearances on British television came from their moral determination to address how the Holocaust could have happened. This remains a burning question, but the play’s central question—the moral responsibility of those who saw and knew but did not act—is a topical theme for many recent and current cases.

A brief stint with a big star suggests hopes the show will move elsewhere, which it should — perhaps with some annoying bylines.