As we near the end of what has been a very exacting year for most and an even worse one for others, it gives me great pleasure and not a little satisfaction to confirm that my stage play, entitled “Mengele” will open in Eastbourne in the New Year, before moving to London. Co-written with one of my oldest and most trusted friends, Tim Marriott, it is a three act stage play, dark, sinister and challenging which will test both the imagination and the sensitivities of the theatre goer alike.
For those of you who have read my novel, Right to Live, you will know about my research and sometimes exhausting quest to discover more about one of the most evil men to have walked this earth. His background is well documented and his life picked over with a fine toothcomb, but his last years are still a matter of conjecture. Much revision has taken place and there are those who believe that he died a very lonely man, yet others are still firmly convinced that his ’empire’ stretched way beyond the South American jungles and into the USA and Europe. There is no doubt that he was well-financed by his wealthy family back in Bavaria throughout his years in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil and he never appeared to want for anything. Unrepentant to the end, according to his son Rolf, a lawyer, the ‘Angel of Death’ was a committed genocidal and nihilistic Nazi, who saw purity in his crackpot experiments, juxtaposing immense cruelty with random acts of kindness and acting with a dispassionate cruelty seemingly on a whim.
I hope that many of you will get to see the play, whether in Eastbourne or London. We are planning to take it on tour to festivals and fringes across the country and in time, turn it into a TV play. I wish you all a peaceful Christmas.