The Architect’s Walk
Daniel Keene

Red Shed Company
Arts Theatre

Such was his sense of manifest destiny that Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, drew artist’s impressions of the buildings of the Reich as two thousand year old ruins. Much later, in an interview for European TV, Speer observed, like a naughty schoolboy, that he was glad the Fuhrer was not around any more. He would not be pleased with Speer’s work, it was all built of such inferior concrete that it crumbled after only twenty years.

It is characteristic of Speer that he would talk of Hitler like just another fractious client. For more than forty years after the war, including the nineteen years he spent in Spandau prison, the most Speer would admit was that he had given “tacit approval” to the atrocities of the regime. His capacity to displace responsibility and reconstruct reality enabled him to escape execution at Nuremberg. He also maintained this view to his two “confessors” -Georges Casalis, the French Calvinist priest at Spandau, whose help Speer sought to become “a different man”, and biographer Gitta Sereny, whose book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, first appeared in 1995.

In his fine new play The Architect’s Walk, playwright Daniel Keene draws on Sereny and Speer’s own Spandau diaries to explore the mind of a moral amnesiac. Directed by Timothy Maddock, this eerie chamber work is based around Speer’s extraordinary life in Spandau. While Rudolf Hess receded into depression and kleptomania, Speer, ever buoyant, planted a garden in the prison grounds- vegetables, strawberries, and hundreds of trees -lilacs, chestnuts and hazelnuts.

He also began his Walk around the World. Establishing a walking path through his garden, he figured that thirty circuits would be the equivalent of seven kilometres a day. One morning in1954 he imagined he was walking from Berlin to Heidelberg. Then, plotting his path in his atlas, he criss-crossed Europe and Asia.

The opening scene is of Speer pacing in his garden. The set by Imogen Thomas – tall, impenetrable dark walls circling a bare stage with five thin, branchless birches stretching through the flies- is powerfully spare, an effect only intensified by Karen Norris’s anhedonic lighting. And the music by Michael Smetanin adds a fidgetty, industrial jangle to the proceedings.

Keene runs two narratives through the piece. One centres on Speer’s conversations with Casalis and Hess. The other is a grim fable of a forester who finds a dead woman deep in the forest and carries her to God in the hope that she will be restored. The link between Speer’s model, tree garden and the terrible, unredeemable deaths of innocents in the forests of Europe works subliminally through the production. As the Chorus, Polish-born actor, Mark Gaweda creates a sorrowful threnody, augmented by soprano Alison Farr’s untranslated songs based on poems by Paul Celan.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Edwin Hodgeman, replacing an injured Frank Whitten, is suitably cranky as Hess and Robert Meldrum’s Casalis explores his predicament both as interrogator and someone exasperated by his task. When he abandons Speer, the prisoner asks him whether they will meet again. I hope not, Casalis replies, because then we would have to recognise one another.

As Speer, Ralph Cotterill captures the architect’s opaque morality and curious optimism. It is a fine performance, never calling up our sympathy but allowing us to study his case. Cotterill gives him vigour, like a middle aged Bondi swimmer. His obtuseness is evident, as is his intelligence. And the sheer eccentricity of a world walk of 31,000 kms is both obsessive and poetic.

Timothy Maddock has brought together the disparate elements of Keene’s text with compelling effect. Some aspects, like the gallows humour of the cabaret duet between Hess and Speer, don’t quite work, and the roving soprano in her scarlet dress is also a risk. The accordion and drum scene- dead soldiers walking, played by Ron Pearce and John Menhennett , is creepy, though, like something from a Grosz cartoon.

But if there are unresolved effects, they are made up for by the final scene. A mirror of the opening, the solitary Speer is sweeping in his garden. His walk has taken him to America where everyone is talking about the Kennedy assassination. Speer is himself a figure in history, a history he still denies. Smetanin’s score has a Glass-like modal calm and the words of the chorus remain with us – “we build and we build and we are washed away.” With this inventive new Daniel Keene again proves he is our most literate playwright. The Architect’s Walk is a melancholy one, but it is road well worth travelling.

The Adelaide Review, No.174, March, 1998. p.37.