Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, Upstairs at the Gatehouse 12 – 28 Sept 2025
‘It’s a fascinating play with real characters whom you believe in and care about – even Hitler.’ ★★★★
“A group can only be excited by an excessive stimulus. Anyone who wishes to produce an effect on it needs no logical adjustment in his argument; he must paint in the most forcible colours, he must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again.” Sigmund Freud, 1918.
There’s some evidence that, as a child in Austria, Adolph Hitler used to wet his bed. There’s very strong evidence that his father, Alois Hitler, was a strict disciplinarian with a filthy temper, who beat his son mercilessly. And there’s anecdotal evidence that Hitler’s mother Clara considered taking him to see the eminent Jewish Viennese psychiatrist Dr Sigmund Freud.
What if she had done it? Would history have been different? That’s the question that occurred to the famous television comedy writing team of Marks and Gran, and from this comes one of the best counterfactual plays I know, Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler.
They begin by painting a picture of the Hitler and Freud households at the turn of the century, and then bring them together to create a fascinating and completely convincing relationship. Right from the start there are a few knowing asides to an audience to which all this is history. “Does he complain of tiredness and lack of living space?” Freud asks Mrs Hitler. I will not tell the rest of the story, because wondering what happens next is one of the joys of this play, but the discovery that Freud used to spend his summers in Berchtesgaden, later the site of Hitler’s country home, was gold dust to Marks and Gran.
There are moments to treasure. In Vienna after the first world war, Freud takes Hitler to coffee, leaving the cash for the bill on his saucer as he leaves, and the impoverished Hitler steals the waiter’s tip. And there are uncomfortable insights, such as the quote at the top of this review, which comes from Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego – a book which, in the Marks and Gran version of history, Freud shows to Hitler.
It’s a fascinating play with real characters whom you believe in and care about – even Hitler. It’s well executed by the resident director at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Isaac Bernier-Doyle, who has assembled an excellent six-strong cast, without a weak link anywhere.
But of course the show stands or falls with the actors playing Freud and Hitler, and the chemistry between them. Jonahan Tafler is a marvellous Freud, all Viennese kindness and generosity spilling over sometimes – as his wife points out – into complacency. Sam Mac is a splendid Hitler, brittle, nervy, over-sensitive and utterly self-centred.
A fine play with a strong cast, it’s well worth the trip to Highgate Village.
Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, Upstairs at the Gatehouse 12 – 28 Sept 2025
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Photo credit: Cromolume
