REVIEW: Alone in Berlin, York Theatre Royal until March 21

HOW would you behave if you were put to the test? If you lived in a police state, say, and your neighbour was a member of a persecuted minority being bullied by a government thug? Would you speak out? Or would you bow your head in shame and pretend you hadn't noticed?

And even if you did pluck up the courage to protest, would it really make any difference?

These are the questions posed by Alone In Berlin, the powerful adaptation of Hans Fallada's searing novel about courage and cowardice in Nazi-era Berlin (itself based on a true story) that has just opened for a 19-day run at York Theatre Royal.

Otto and Anna Quangel are an ordinary, decent, middle-aged Berlin couple - Otto a carpenter, Anna a housewife. Both lived through the Depression; both voted for Hitler because they thought he would bring jobs.

When the play opens, they have just received a letter informing them that their son, Marcus, has died fighting for the fatherland. He wasn't a soldier, a heartbroken Otto sobs: he just wanted to sit at home and fix radios.

There's a knock at the door. It's the Quangel's boorish neighbour Klaus Borkhausen, come to share a drink with them to toast the Nazis' latest victory, the fall of France. Heil Hitler! he says, giving Anna a long stare when she doesn't respond.

Borkhausen is the kind of bully who thrives under tyranny. He mocks a Jewish neighbour of the Quangels. Anna, haltingly, speaks up in her defence. Borkhausen glares, and launches into a harangue about loyalty to the Fatherland. The word 'traitor' is used. Then he goes, with another insistent Heil Hitler. Again, Anna doesn't respond. It's an offence not to use the greeting, Borkhausen reminds her.

The Quangels argue - Otto furious with Anna for not being more careful. Later, when she shelters their Jewish neighbour for the night, he objects, and says she must be 'out of the house by 6am'. Gradually, however, he comes to accept that good people - if they really want to think themselves good - cannot just do nothing in the face of tyranny.

He and his wife begin to write quietly seditious postcards, questioning whether Hitler really is governing in the interests of the German people. Otto distributes them around Berlin. The cards are noticed: the Gestapo and the SS get on the case - and the hunt for the cards' authors begins...

Alone in Berlin is a quietly devastating play. There's something of Jim and Hilda Bloggs (the elderly British couple from Raymond Briggs' graphic novel When the Wind Blows) about Otto and Anna. They're an ordinary couple who are put to the test and who decide, in their own small way, to do something. They decide that their spirit will not be entirely crushed by oppression.

There's a wonderfully lived-in, crumpled look to Denis Conway, who plays Otto in this touring production by director James Dacre. Charlotte Emmerson, meanwhile, brings a weary, quiet courage to Anna.

On their trail is Jay Taylor's swaggering, ambitious SS officer and Joseph Marcell as a dapper Gestapo officer, Inspector Escherich. It is the Gestapo man who becomes one of the play's most interesting, slippery characters. He was just an ordinary policeman before the Nazis came to power, he tells Otto in one climactic scene. He's just learned to adapt, that's all. Otto is contemptuous. "That makes you worse!" he says. "You don't believe in anything!"

In another scene, Taylor's SS officer taunts Otto. How many cards did you distribute? he asks. 285, Otto says. And of those, 267 were handed straight in to the police, the SS man says. So you've done all this for 18 cards that probably no-one read anyway. "18 is 18," Otto says. "It's not nothing."

It isn't nothing. But it's not very much, either.

In fact, there isn't very much in the way of comfort at all in Alone in Berlin. Jonathan Fensom's sets are harshly lit, emphasizing the brutal blacks and whites that speak of repression. Jessica Walker's 'Golden Elsie' acts as a kind of chorus, providing a musical commentary on events. But she's not so much avenging angel as dispassionate observer.

Yet there is a grain of optimism to be found after all. It lies in this. As Otto says, 18 is not nothing. As long as the human spirit is not quite crushed, then there is hope.

So how would you behave? Perhaps the best we can hope for is that we never have to find out...

Stephen Lewis

Alone in Berlin runs at the Theatre Royal until March 21. Tickets, starting at £15, are available from the box office on 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk