Heil Plewman
It does not take long to recognise Tim Plewman's quality in Greg Viljoen's The Last Moustache. It is simply amazing to watch Plewman at work. One-handers are serious business and requires an actor to be in tip-top condition, and Plewman is brilliant in his portrayal of Adolf Hitler.
Picture: Ruphin Coudyzer
Greg Viljoen’s script is tricky to negotiate, but he gives superb direction to Plewman in a story riddled with laughter, but also shot through with serious themes.
The story imagines a scenario in which, as some conspiracy theories have suggested, Hitler escaped to Argentina at the end of World War II and lived there to a very old age.
For the most part the work echoes Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” dictum, being a performance within a performance.
Joseph Goebbels was one of Hilter’s closest associates and as minister of propaganda, he is a comical, but pivotal figure in The Last Moustache as well.
Specifically, this story is about how the Nazi propaganda machine devised a cunning plan to convince the world that Hitler survived, which involved hiring a number of actors to take on the role of Hitler. One of these actors was Heiner Schmidt, a once highly acclaimed German theatrical performer.
Finding out how that actor dealt with a situation in which
being good at his job only made his life more complicated makes this an interesting piece of theatre indeed.
