Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Hess
Hess 2026
Genre: Solo Performance, Theatre
Venue: Gilded Balloon Teviot
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Having escaped from a hospital guard, Hess is found wandering with a brown paper bag filled of his paper and provisions. Stopping for a moment in the garden of the hospital he takes the chance to talk directly to the audience, the faces he sees. He begins by going over his ailments and his feeling of injustice at the way he was treated before his personal viewpoints begin to surface. As he dresses himself in the uniform of his past, the prejudice that he continues to believe in is one that is astonishingly inescapable.
Review
Hess is a 50-year-old play about the deputy Fuhrer behind the Thousand Year Reich whose major historical impact was 85 years ago, but never has a warning felt so modern. The most astonishing thing however is the fact that this feels as though it has come along at the right time. Michael Burrell’s Hess is revived from 1976, and we should have learnt, confining this to history programmes and Netflix specials. We also had Chumbawamba’s warning of the day the Nazi died when Hess eventually died and how they all came out to mourn him, reminding us that his ideas have not died with him.
Burrell’s original script has a slight update referencing things like Ukraine and the war there, however, remains faithful to its original. There, unfortunately, is no need to update universal horror at universally abhorrent themes. This is a very skilful solo performance by Derek Crawford Munn. The script gives Munn a strong platform upon which to guide us through three phases of the message that Hess wishes to hide and to tell.
It begins by feeling very uncomfortable. We have an elderly man who is suffering from an ulcer, who desires some form of sympathy. When he begins to talk of how he has been disgracefully treated and compares himself with other leaders, it has some traction. You feel the sympathy and the laughter from the audience and start to feel, maybe, just maybe, it is a platform for this man. It reminded me of just how easy it can be to be suckered in.
My worry that this perhaps was going to be a platform rather than a critique, moved when Hess moved into his description of the Russians being subhuman. We are now given an indication of where it is all going.
When the borrowed uniform that he took off the peg before taking his final flight over to Scotland is put on, it ends with him masking nothing and telling all. By end when he has his hand in the noose saluting, we are left in no doubt that Rudolf Hess Deputy Fuhrer was part of the problem and was never anything to do with the solution.
Munn manages to capture the essence of a man who is elderly but also unashamed. It can be an uncomfortable viewing because the authenticity that he has managed to achieve is conveyed well. It is directed with one hand in history, the other hand on a warning.
The tone and the pace are perfectly pitched, allowing us to believe that with the entire use of the stage, the meandering elderly should not be giving a pathway to escape.
Technically, this has very little added to it, though the image at the end is stark and prolific. Hess creates a noose into which he is going to put his head, but he ends up by slipping out of it and his hand going in thus giving him the opportunity to give the final salute. It is poignant as he escaped the death penalty as he was acquitted on one charge – crimes against humanity. He escaped the noose on a technicality upon which our global justice system at that point faltered.
As we watch silent protests of people dressed all in black standing outside Daily Record offices in Glasgow or people in balaclavas throwing traffic cones at people whose colour of skin they dislike in the centre of Glasgow, or we have people chanting outside of hotels in Falkirk, it is hard not to believe that we are back in 1976. Then it was the rise of the National Front and the demand for Enoch Powell to be Prime Minister. Now we have a leader of a right-wing party looking to avoid scrutiny as a potential leader of the country. Here Hess does not avoid the scrutiny because he has been given the chance to just talk. It is a therapy which he misunderstands the point of. Instead of telling us of why people should get suckered into it, it points out why we need to drag everybody out of it otherwise we will become as delusional as the elderly man who finished his days in Spandau. Hess’s memory should be left there until history needs to once again provide a warning for dark days and if these get any darker this should be on tour on a permanent basis.
