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NEWS
TOUCHING THE PAST, a play about Nancy Astor, Britain’s first female MP
STORM feature film based on the SAS’s secret war in Oman is in pre-production with director R. Paul Wilson
NIGHT, a new play, opens at The Old Library, Bodmin December 2019
ALL AT SEA, feature film comedy, was released in September 2019
TOUCHING THE PAST, a play about Nancy Astor, Britain’s first female MP
STORM feature film based on the SAS’s secret war in Oman is in pre-production with director R. Paul Wilson
NIGHT, a new play, opens at The Old Library, Bodmin December 2019
ALL AT SEA, feature film comedy, was released in September 2019
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- Evening Standard, Wednesday October 1 2002
An amoral adventuress'sflirtation with fascism- THERE would probably have been a death penalty for any wag daring to coin the term Hitler's Babes, leaders of the Third Reich famously had as much of a taste for beautiful women as they did for bloodshed. The recent deaths of film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and socialite Diana Moseley have turned the spotlight once more on the Führer's taste in women, even if the supposed promiscuity of his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, proved a rather spicier story.
Land of Lies takes up the story of Magda Goebbels, the opportunist divorcee who discovered her sexual nemesis after attending a rally where Goebbels was stirring up more passion than even he had anticipated. In Gerald Moon's and Hugh Janes's easy-to-digest script, Magda is revealed as an amoral man cater, who has already off-loaded her wealthy industrialist husband and now sees Nazism as a bit of harmless foreplay to her seduction of the fascist Casanova.
There is sparkle and style, but not enough complexity in an evening which significantly plays down Magda's Jewish connections (her stepfather Richard Friedlander ensured that she was familiar with Jewish rituals and customs), and goes nowhere near the dark heart of her Faustian pact with Nazi politics. That, however, may be partly dim to Magda herself, who - as portrayed in Gertrude Thoma's patrician performance - -- spent her life embodying different feminine ideals, and was never going to let the snake of self-analysis disrupt her illusory Garden of Eden. That sense of idle feminine glamour is sustained in Norma West's glittering performance as her sister-in-law, and Moon's simply-staged production flashes by effortlessly.
Rachel Halliburton
- THERE would probably have been a death penalty for any wag daring to coin the term Hitler's Babes, leaders of the Third Reich famously had as much of a taste for beautiful women as they did for bloodshed. The recent deaths of film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and socialite Diana Moseley have turned the spotlight once more on the Führer's taste in women, even if the supposed promiscuity of his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, proved a rather spicier story.
~ Hugh Janes ~ writer ~ author ~ Playwright ~ Screenwriter ~ Plays ~ television ~ films ~ filmwriter ~ wide blue yonder ~ the haunting ~ two of a kind ~ the perfect murder ~ deadlock ~ master forger ~ a soldier's song ~ the complete ring of the nibelung