by Roger Childs

Her fourth solo performance piece

Jan Bolwell has previously performed three shows about her forebears, but this time it’s on controversial German film director Leni Riefenstahl. She looks back from her seventies and tells Riefenstahl’s story from the 1920s when she was a dancer, through her time as Hitler’s filmmaker in the 1930s, confrontations with Goebbels, and ending with excerpts from her films about nature.

It is a monologue, which won’t appeal to everyone, in which Jan acts out the part of a woman who was decades ahead of her time as a movie-maker. However, much of the performance is devoted to justifying her complicity with the Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler and responding to claims that that she must have known about the concentration camps and other Nazi atrocities. She speaks strongly in her own defence, not always convincingly, and points out that there were 50 court cases taken against her throughout her life and she won them all. That said, her naivety in supping with the devil she knew is clear to see.

She was a much-heralded dancer in the twenties known as the ‘German Isadora Duncan’ and she recalls these early years when she was exploited by men and started dabbling in film making before she took advantage of what Hitler was prepared to provide for her to promote the Nazi regime and the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Supporting the recollections
Composer Jan Bolton comments in the program that Leni’s long and multi-faceted life provided an invitation to create music using widely varied musical genre and this works well in creating the appropriate moods. There is also a changing backdrop of photos which sometimes could have been clearer and sharper.

I did expect that there would be some short film clips from Triumph of the Will and Olympia, but, in a post-performance chat with the audience, the production team stated that they didn’t want to show swastikas and other Nazi material. Their arguments were not convincing.

I also felt that there could have more on her film-making skills which demonstrated that she was well ahead of her time, especially in documenting sport on screen.

Overall it was an informative, absorbing and generally convincing portrayal of probably the most famous German woman in the twentieth century.

“Supping with the Devil” will feature at Wellington’s Bats Theatre: 8-12 April. Bookings at Eventfinda