Degenerate Art

Toby Schmitz hits almost all marks as the writer of Degenerate Art, its director and also one of this impressive ensemble – he even plays Goebbels, that master of Nazi propaganda.   

All the Nazi team leaders are there, in this snappy and dark portrait of how obsessed they all were about painting, arts and architecture, but of the right kind.  Expertly framed by narrator Megan O’Connell, the only female voice, Degenerate Art flicks quickly through their boyish arts and mad social theories in 1920’s Germany, through to awesome power, their frenzied European looting of the masters, and final ruin.  

It’s an obstreperous pack playing out against the paint-scared background of Maya Keys’ set, lit evocatively (if overly shadowed) by Alexander Berlage.  Schmitz’s snippets of fast monologues are poetic, delightfully idiosyncratic, if sometimes in need of an editor. 

Like Schmitz’s own charismatic, boho engagement as an actor, this slick ensemble sports delicious self-mockery in performance; they may be black-suited Nazis but – like us – they are, scarily, perhaps not so abnormal.  

Slowly though their characters take shape: the foppish Hermann Goering (Giles Gartrell-Mills), Heinrich Himmler (Guy Edmonds), a bellicose Hitler (Henry Nixon), Goebbels (Schmitz), the Butcher of Prague, Reinhard Heydrich (Rupert Reid) and the only one finally let free, the architect Albert Speer (a seductive Septimus Caton).  

Their competition for art loot, their gross art theories, makes compelling theatre, even if, politically and personally, we’re still left wondering quite why these Mafiosi boys were so obsessed with it.  Schmitz charms by making these monsters just like us, joking to us,  but still I wanted more, even risking empathy, on their deadly reverence for the arts.

Martin Portus

Photographer: John Marmaras