Camp Siegfried, review: transfixingly plausible tale of Nazi youth in 1930s America

The Amazon Prime series The Man in The High Castle – based on the 1962 Philip K Dick novel – memorably envisages a US that succumbed, at least in the east and mid-west, to the Nazi jack-boot. But intimations of – and preparations for – the dystopian nightmare of a victorious Third Reich could actually be found, for real, a short train ride from Manhattan in the 1930s.

Starring two of our brightest young actors, Patsy Ferran and Luke Thallon, Camp Siegfried by American playwright Bess Wohl revisits the chilling and shaming fact that a youth summer camp of that name – fostering Nazi indoctrination – ran between 1936 and 1941 in Yaphank on Long Island.

And it wasn’t unique. Organised for those of German descent, it sounds like a cross between boot camp and Butlin’s – a lot of outdoor sports, hiking about, rousing speeches and encouraged sexual activity, the better to bring about the kind of volk who would see off the Bolsheviks and combine the American way with Deutschland uber alles. There were even streets named after Hitler and Goebbels; it got closed, naturlich, in 1941.

Wohl – who alighted on the subject by chance, holed up nearby during an early phase of the pandemic – might be seen to have bagged a gift of a dramatic subject. But the challenges aren’t inconsiderable: how to convey the heady euphoria of the experience without endorsing it, how to signal what those activities represented without arming the characters with hindsight – plus, in purely logistical terms, who gets included in this distilled act of social history?

Whereas the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit could show a 10-year-old running about a Hitler Youth camp, theatre thrives when it gets its audience’s imagination working; it has also got – especially in the post Covid case of the Old Vic – a tight budget. So, in an act of daring minimalism, Wohl alights on two archetypal teens, an unnamed boy and girl, charting their growing, darkening relationship.

Director Katy Rudd presents the pair on a fairly stark stage, long narrow strips insinuating woodland behind them. There are ambivalent sounds; are those fireworks or explosives? There’s also some hard-to-glean period newsreel footage.

Thanks to this concentration, they brilliantly lay bare the vulnerability, affirmation-need, lust for life and worldly ignorance upon which the pro-Nazi organisers preyed. Living under the dictatorship of hormones, these youngsters don’t know who they are. Which means, as the summer of 1938 progresses, Wohl can ambush us by showing sides to their nature that surprise us as much as it unsettles them, testing our sympathies, blurring the line between forgivable naivety and irredeemable Nazism. What they’re told and how the camp operates is left out; it’s as if it seeps into their systems by osmosis, like a primal force.

Both Ferran and Thallon are superlative in marking the staging-posts of the pair’s sexual awakening, ideological corruption and psychological turmoil. Ferran holds the eye as a 16-year-old of comical gawky reticence, hands fluttering, head making abrupt turns, eyebrows sweetly astonished. With his hearty talk of “Kampfgeist”, Thallon supplies handsome brawn, with a side order of nervy solicitousness. Their flirtation – conducted at first over loud oompah music and attended by a midge-like cloud of insecurities – envelopes them, and us.

Some lurches in behaviour – his towards violent savagery, hers towards a rapt submission before a deified Fuhrer – bear the imprint, or at least hint, of authorial manipulation. I’d say that his furtive masturbating as she, unbuttoning, intones forceful lines in German feels like a crude step too far.

Yet, overall, their rites of passage journey from summer of love to world of hate feels transfixingly plausible. The grim moment in a speech to camp when Ferran’s wallflower blossoms into a familiar, tirading figure has you questioning who you thought she was, and what all of us are capable of doing.

Until 30 Oct. Tickets: 0344 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com