Soldiers

Germany's Rolf Hochhuth is a demon researcher, an addicted player of the blame game, and a member of the lapel-grabbing school of play writing. In The Deputy, he buttonholed playgoers to blame Pope Pius XII for not having protested the murder of 6,000,000 Jews. In Soldiers, he is again peremptorily grabbing the audience's lapels to argue that Churchill connived at the murder of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, head of the Polish government in exile, in order to placate Stalin.

Another charge made by Hochhuth is that through certain insinuative speeches, Churchill manipulated Hitler into initiating a few scattered bombing raids on British towns. Churchill thus could feel free to launch massive retaliatory fire-storm raids on the hapless civilians of Hamburg and Dresden. Since it was Hitler's Luftwaffe that began indiscriminate mass bombing in an attempt to break British morale, this charge is patently false. In the matter of General Sikorski's plane-crash death, no convincing proof is proffered that Churchill had a hand in it. It is a tenuous personal speculation indicative only of a common European fascination with conspiratorial-plot theories of history. One cut above a crank and several cuts below a thinker, Hochhuth seems very much like those dedicated slaphappy few who insist that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.

As a dramatist, Hochhuth is arid and windy, substituting rhetoric for dialogue and debate for conflict. The drama is brought in from offstage like an imported delicacy--dispatches about the sinking of the Scharnhorst, or the discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, or telegrams from F.D.R. and Stalin.

Onstage, an incessant talkfest drones on about the methods and morality of war--all of it aimed at justifying Hochhuth's conviction that mass bombing should be prohibited by international law. Much of the time, Lord Cherwell (Joseph Shaw) confers with Churchill on the best tactics to follow. Cherwell, Churchill's friend and wartime scientific adviser, is presented as an eminence noire who, with a kind of icy diaholism, determined the Prime Minister's policies on both Sikorski and mass bombings. This again is at distinct variance with the historical record.

Limbo is where the play would be without the sculptured monumentality of John Colicos' performance as Churchill. Though the part is essentially a great caricature of Churchill, Colicos turns the role into a realm. He achieves one of those memorable personifications where the actor imperceptibly fuses artifice and reality. He dominates the stage with feral tenacity, and there is an uncannily mnemonic effect in his feat of physical resemblance. The pudgy hands thrust the walking stick forward like an advance scout probing enemy territory; the pouty lips nurse the huge cigar; the gruff, lisping voice rasps out even cadences like waves beating on the shore. Many of the words he is given to say, however, seem in closer accord with der Fuehrer Prinzip than with bluff British pragmatism. Never for a moment is the playgoer unaware that this is a Teutonic Churchill and that Hochhuth is still playing the blame game--not so much to prod the consciences of other men as to slough off on them part of the German burden of guilt for the holocausts of war and genocide.

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