Having won top awards at the United Solo Festival in New York, Leni’s Last Lament now comes to the Edinburgh Fringe. Hitler’s controversial filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, poses as a misunderstood victim as she attempts to edit, reassemble, and sanitise her notorious past.
Comic and timely, Leni’s Last Lament is presented as a macabre cabaret; set in Leni’s editing room, the play is a wild ironic ride full of hard-to-believe insights into this provocative figure as she tries to present a more palatable version of herself.
Leni can be considered the original influencer, whose propaganda films made Hitler into the ‘saviour’ the German people believed they needed after years of economic turmoil. Her films promised them a leader who would make Germany great again, in ways that feel hauntingly familiar today. A woman of many contradictions, Leni aligned herself with Hitler for fame – and although blacklisted for this alliance, she is still recognised as a genius filmmaker for her innovative work by the film community throughout her long and varied life. She lived to be 101 years old.
Playwright Gil Kofman comments, In a time when truth is constantly being re-shaped and tailored to fit convenient political agendas, it is critical to reflect on an ambitious individual like Leni Riefenstahl (a liberated woman way ahead of her time) whose ambition and narcissism enabled her to seriously overlook the horrors of her work in service of her art. Leni’s story is incredibly relevant, at a time when people are misbehaving and perpetrating one horror after another with impunity and blithe unaccountability.
In Kofman’s appraisal of Riefenstahl, he says, Some say that without Leni there’d be no Hitler; others say that without Leni there’d be no Star Wars. A controversial filmmaker who directed Triumph of the Will for Hitler at his 1934 Nuremberg Rally, Leni Riefenstahl’s work is often credited with creating the Nazi brand and promoting its aesthetic. Despite that, her work is considered groundbreaking, and is still studied at film schools today.
The show rightly depicts the filmmaker as a barrier-smashing female artist in an overwhelmingly male-dominated society, while taking a sceptical attitude toward her contention that she didn’t know the evils the Nazis were up to when she made those films. Kofman’s script, Markell’s charisma and Caliban’s atmospheric and inventive production add up to a smart, funny, and chilling experience (Blog Critics).
