REVIEW: Through a Judas Window at Etcetera Theatre 5 – 7 March 2026
‘The visual imagery was effective as was the 1930s German music but …’ ★★
Through a Judas Window by PS Lynch was based on his recently published novel A Mind Prone to Evil. This is a one actor play where the characters were subtly differentiated by accents and a minimum of visual change but the differences worked well and only three characters and a voiceover of an American officer at the Nuremberg trials was enough to tell the tale. The story looked into the mind of Hermann Goring.
We were introduced to Goring’s taste in fine art by an art dealer who revealed his fascination with Lucas Cranach the Elder and this artist’s obsession of depictions of scenes of decapitation; his greed for the acquisition of many artworks stolen from all over Europe and not all from Jewish families’ collections; and his almost comical reasoning exempting himself from guilt for taking them in the first place. The symbolism in the artwork was cleverly connected to the irony and allegory of the situation in the Third Reich with Goring smugly but accurately pointing out that looting was a long established past-time of all major European regimes.
The attempts of the psychiatrist Douglas Kelley to identify some kind of evil Nazi mindset motivating those on trial, mostly by splitting hairs and entering into semantic bickering failed miserably in the end. His conclusion was that the Nazi party was comprised of a group of very unremarkable people. Not what he was employed to show. However, this play focuses on the one exception that stands out from other sources.
Goring’s intimidating image in dark glasses, saying nothing and striking an imposing figure on stage was an echo of the charismatic figure who supposedly dominated the Nuremberg trials with his wit and élan. In fact the visual images on display onstage though simple, were effective, as was the 1930s German music on the radio. But after a while I wondered where it was all going. Was it just his story? If so, most of the audience would have known how it ended thus asking, is there any purpose? Why do we have to hear it all again?
What did we find out that we did not already know about Goering? Well, not a lot but as it was based on a book that I’ll bet most of the audience will never read and that as always in these cases would have contained much more information than can ever have been put into a short play; it might have been better to bring out some of the less well known facts about the man and his life. Concentration on his taste in art was perhaps an attempt at this. Going further in this direction without sticking to the events of the trial which we could all identify him by, might have taken us on a path that exposed something new and unexpected and left us with an experience of a man we would find hard to identify with the deputy leader of the Nazi Party and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe; a difficult choice to make or a hard task to accomplish in such a short play.
In the end it was a good advert for the book and an amusing play.
A one man play by P.S.Lynch
