Playwright and performer Jan Bolwell is fascinated by controversial women and she enjoys bringing them to our attention. One of those who I had never heard of until Wednesday night is Leni Riefenstahl – a German film-maker and artist, who was known as Hitler’s “pin-up girl’’ for allegedly supporting the dictator by making two well-known Nazi propaganda films w and led to her being ostracised.

On stage at Bats Theatre, Bolwell, 75, recounts Riefenstahl’s life in a complex and gripping solo performance. Under the direction of Annie Ruth, we meet Leni in a courtroom, when she is challenging one of the 50 accusations brought against her. After the war, she was arrested for being a “Nazi traveller’’, but she denied knowing anything about the Holocaust. “I knew nothing about the gas chambers,’’ she says. “Liar,’’ a recorded voice calls from the mock courtroom. [More]

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Supping with the Devil is a one-person play about Leni Riefenstahl who, in case you hadn’t heard, was a 20^th-century phenomenon: a successful actor, dancer and photographer, and an internationally acclaimed film director, cinematographer and film editor. Her work included films still regarded as masterpieces of cinematic brilliance and effectiveness as propaganda: Triumph of the Will, which covered the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg, and Olympia, which covered the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin.

Her propaganda works were funded by the Nazi party. She was a personal favourite of Adolf Hitler, who admired her work and Aryan beauty. She had a prickly but productive relationship with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi head of propaganda. Connections like these meant that she spent the rest of her long post-war life (she died aged 101, in 2003) defending herself against charges that she had been an active Nazi.  

She always denied them, claiming that she was non-political and remained unaware of the Nazi death camps throughout the war (she knew there were camps, she just didn’t know they were ‘death camps’). She freely acknowledged that she had great admiration for Hitler as a man and leader.

So how does writer and actor Jan Bolwell go about turning multiple decades of artistic achievement and controversy into a one-hour, one-person show? The short answer is, by careful selection and with the help of an outstanding production team.

The script itself is an achievement for its sheer scope. It gives us well-crafted vignettes from Riefenstahl’s teenage years, when she first becomes interested in dancing, all the way through her dancing and acting triumphs, then her filmmaking achievements, and finally, through to later life when she became involved in underwater filming and photography.

This material is linked together in the form of an explanation and defence of her life and achievements. Sometimes, we see her appearing before an actual court or tribunal. Sometimes, she’s simply telling the audience how it was. By the end, she’s pleading with us – “All I ever wanted to do was create beauty. Am I to be condemned for this?”

Sometimes the format gets a bit static, along the lines of a slideshow lecture. No surprises here, given the sheer amount of exposition to be got through. Bolwell is well aware of this, and she varies the pace with short dance sequences and episodes of live action; filming the Olympics, for example. It’s a polished, well-sustained and committed performance on Bolwell’s part.

Bolwell also has an extremely impressive production team to help keep the action moving and the audience involved. The following may now step up and take a bow: Annie Ruth, director; Helen Todd, designer and lighting director; Jan Bolton, composer; Neal Barber, technician and production system.

The lighting is super-simple, crisp and evocative. The set is minimalist, clean cut, versatile, eloquent. The visual display – mostly big blow-up photos but also some movie clips – is practically a character in its own right, it interacts so effectively with the script. It helps here that a lot of the photos carry an inbuilt punch in terms of subject matter – here’s Leni with Adolf, Leni with Joseph, Leni with Adolf and Joseph, and that’s an image of Kristallnacht.

As an aside, it’s a pleasure to see BATS’ much loved but, let’s face it, slightly careworn The Stage polish up so well.

Sound and music include original pieces, including a beautifully performed song (Jess Deacon, lead vocalist; Vincent and April Corkery, vocalists), plus sound effects to fit the action. The sound element is always effective, and often outstanding.

Taken together, we get a sense of a coherent artistic vision being given life through the combined efforts of some skilled and creative people, masterfully brought together by director Annie Ruth.

So it’s a pleasure to see all this theatrical creativity presented so beautifully onstage. That being said, the overall effect of the show on me is downbeat. Jan Bolwell portrays Riefenstahl as being a bit wooden, as was the original (at least according to the YouTube clips I’ve watched). The character is also mostly unlikeable, being cold, vain and competitive. Her self-justifications strike me as barely credible, although a supporter might say this is due to Bolwell’s selection of material and/or the limitations of my own understanding.

The production itself doesn’t hide its conclusions. The program tells us in advance that this is a study of an artist who becomes corrupted by her quest for power and fame. This is confirmed, or at least that’s how I read it, by the juxtaposed images we see at the close, of the beauty of nature side by side with a grim icon of Nazi systematic cruelty.

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I was curious about Supping with the Devil going in, about the need for telling this particular story at this particular time – the show blurb says, “Leni Riefenstahl is a gifted artist who creates films for Hitler. This ultimately ruins her career, leading to her downfall.” Poor blossom – I wondered if I was supposed to feel sorry for her.

Throughout Jan Bolwell’s performance, I waver back and forth – do I feel pity? Was she just a woman of her time, prey to the whims of powerful men without the agency to say no with harm? Was she an opportunist, an ambitious extremely clever and visionary woman who saw the chance to succeed and took it? (We all know how women like that are tarred.)

Bolwell navigates this complexity with dexterity. Her script is intelligent, and creates uncertainty, for me anyway, about how I should be feeling about her character. I’m troubled by the sense of ‘a naif who doesn’t know better’ in a time when it’s all too easy for us to plead ignorance of or disinterest in the social disintegration and rise of fascism because it’s not touching us. (Yet! But actually it is, let’s be real.)

The audience watches quietly, thoughtfully, with the occasional collective chuckle. A man hrrmphs patronisingly at a comment about a woman using her sexuality to get what she wants, which feels like he’s missing the point but also demonstrating the point. 

Bolwell intersperses and punctuates her script with small moments of gentle dance, graceful and transitory. Her black drapey dress moves softly around her and blends her into and out of the background, much the same as the photos projected behind her fade in and out.

This show sat uncomfortably with me – I’m still not convinced we need more stories about apologists and collaborators – but it left me thinking – even two days later – about my own blinkers and prejudices. Bolwell created and presented Supping with the Devil in a way that made sense as a metaphor or allegory for what’s happening in our own timeline and the lingering thoughtfulness is important.

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