Hitler Dances

Synopsis

The haunting central image of Howard Brenton’s searing anti-war play is that of a young girl named Linda, playing games amidst the rubble and ruin of conflict. In the disorienting, genre-defying “Hitler Dances”, Linda’s relationship with a resurrected German soldier from World War II takes an increasingly darker, more psychologically fraught turn. As she is slowly drawn into the soldier’s violent world, her childlike curiosity warps into a chilling metaphor for how the spiritual possession of war’s dehumanising trauma can permeate across generations. Linda acts as the audience’s provocative guide into this psychological haunting.

Brenton pioneered a shocking array of experimental techniques to viscerally thrust viewers into this nightmarish reckoning with historical memory and societal violence. Actors frequently swap roles mid-scene, shattering any illusion of unified characterisation. They step out of the dramatic fiction entirely to directly narrate or commentate. The play lurches from tender naturalism to scathing satirical farce, echoing the uneasy coexistence of war’s harsh realities with glorified myths and sanitised narratives. With jolting tonal shifts and a fragmented postmodern structure, “Hitler Dances” remains a landmark of Brenton’s confrontational, politically-charged theatrical style – a searing anti-war story that eschews conventions and moral arcs for a destabilizing exorcism of our collective dehumanisation.