Through a Twisted Glass

No mere stage work could be expected to evoke the tale of horror that issued from the trial of Adolph Eichmann. But in London last week, audiences reeling out of the St. Martin's Theater were convinced that they had experienced something like a surrealistically twisted version of the Eichmann affair. The play is The Man in the Glass Booth. The booth is a criminal's bulletproof dock, but the drama is anything but shatterproof.

The bizarre story, written by Playwright Robert Shaw,* is packed with comedy that is by turn bleak, black and breezy, but essentially it deals with identity: the identity of Jew and German, the persecuted and the persecutor, and of Christ as expiator. Arthur Goldman, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, has immigrated to New York, where he has become a real estate millionaire. A strangely mixed character he is: gross, vulgar, warm, arrogant, funny, zestful. He is also strangely troubled, apparently fearful that he is being pursued by a man named Dorff, who had been a Nazi SS colonel.

Pack 'Em In. The possibility arises that Goldman himself is Dorff, ironically, making a new life for himself as a Jew. "This isn't a rest cure," he barks at one point. "Back to work, scum. Nobody gets out except through the chimney!" Soon, a team of Israeli agents appears. They kidnap him and take him to Israel to stand trial.

He is a new man now. All the old Nazi arrogance surfaces. Asked if he is Jewish, he replies by describing a day of mass slaughter. "Am I Jewish? We light cigarettes, and we start the shooting. We fill up the bottom. They lay in from the top. The blood runs down from their heads. They lay in from the sides. We pack 'em more, and underneath there's movement . . . I'm a great packer, should have made trunks. Am I Jewish? . . . Just a day in my life. Just a clear day to enjoy forever. I don't know about my mother, but my father was pure-blooded Aryan."

Paean. Still, his personality maintains a subtle ambiguity. When his Jewish secretary visits him in his cell, he is Goldman/Dorff, switching characters with almost imperceptible changes in diction, accent, gesture. Back in the courtroom, he is Dorff again, exhorting the court --and the audience--with a great emotional paean to Hitler. "People of

Jewry," he cries. "Let me speak to you of my Fuhrer with love. He who answered our German need. He who res cued us from the depths . . . His power lay in the love he won from the people . . . Do I see you begin to raise your hands? Do I hear you stamp your feet. He gave us our history. He gave us our news. He gave us our art. He gave us our holidays, he gave us our leisure, and he gave our newly-married a copy of Mein Kampf. At the end we loved him . . . With the killers of the world at our throats, the hordes from the East and West, the capitalists and the Communists, the bombers of cities, the murderers of our children, with bullets in our guts we loved him." Then comes the big shocker: "People of Israel," he declares, "if he had chosen you--if he had chosen YOU--YOU also would have followed where he led!"

As Dorff crouches in his booth, grinning triumphantly at the hushed audience, a woman rises from the fifth row of the theater and screams: "This man is not Dorff!" She had been in the same concentration camp with Goldman, she explains, and had known the real Dorff, had actually seen him killed by the Russians. The man in the glass booth is not Dorff, but Goldman.

Why? Though the play ends, the questions remain. It is here, perhaps, that Playwright Shaw has let his fascination for enigma fail him. Why should a Jewish victim pose as a Nazi? To bring Germany once again to account? To convict the Jews--suicidally resigned to fate after centuries of persecution--of partial complicity in their own destruction? Is Goldman a martyr, crying for Christ's mantle so that he may atone for the world's sins? Is he a Jewish anti-Semite? A brutal prankster? ("He's a moralist, your Honor," says the prosecutor, "and he likes bad jokes.") Shaw never answers the riddle and, in leaving his megaton theme just short of fission, lets his audience down.

Yet, apart from its nagging inconclusiveness--or perhaps because of it --The Man in the Glass Booth is bril liant theater. In addition to the moralintellectual puzzle that Shaw feeds his audience, he has caught the mordant Jewish satirical humor with a keen ear.

"We got a [kosher] restaurant in New York killed more Hebrews than I did," says Dorff at one point. Or, from Goldman: "Jesus! The Pope has forgiven the Jews! Get the Pope on television--we have 14 channels, he has to be on one of them!" The direction by Playwright Harold Pinter (The Homecoming) carries a familiar Pinteresque aura of discomforting mystery, and Donald Pleasence, as Goldman/Dorff, charges his difficult role with a splendid performance that runs from high comedy to a ghastly malevolence.

If London's critics seemed divided and even uncertain about the play, their confusion has not deterred theatergoers. Glass Booth seems assured of a long run--and a lot of controversy.

* From his own novel, published last January. Shaw, 40, an accomplished actor, played the blond killer in From Russia with Love and King Henry VIII in the cinema version of A Man for All Seasons.

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