Yet while Pennington and Horovitch portray their characters to perfection, they are equally capable of portraying those in Harwood's other play (first performed in 1995) Taking Sides, about the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Pennington plays the conductor and Horovitch his American interrogator. If you have never understood why some people regard Furtwängler as so magical, this play compares his work with that of Toscanini and von Karajan, and these comparisons are absolutely spot on. His conducting was extraordinary and when Harwood was preparing the play he asked his daughter in New York to go to Tower Records and get him all the Furtwängler recordings she could. She called back half an hour later to say, "Dad, I've had a terrible time, I went in and the man said, ‘We don't keep Nazi recordings in this shop'." 

So was Furtwängler a Nazi? From Harwood's play it seems that a senior member in the US forces was determined to nail him, so they arranged an interrogation by an American insurance expert named Major Arnold, who was experienced at detecting fraud. Arnold has no feeling for classical music, refers to the great conductor as a "band-leader", brushing aside evidence that he helped Jewish musicians to escape — for Arnold, the ability to help them merely showed his close relations with senior Nazis. Arnold intends to find documentary evidence and trap Furtwängler, but is unable to locate records of his membership in the Nazi Party — he was never a member — and resorts eventually to a Nazi informant who serves his own interests by coming up with unsubstantiated allegations. No records were kept of Arnold's harsh interrogations, yet when Frau Furtwängler read the play, she said, "How did you know?"

Harwood's title allows us to make up our own minds, but the music — in both plays — leads us to sympathise with these extraordinary musicians. What can compare to Strauss's Four Last Songs or Furtwängler's rendering of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the ends of these plays? This is great theatre and Harwood provides us with a sharp turning point towards the end of Taking Sides that allows the dreadful interrogation to come to an end.

We are left with questions. How would we have acted in the circumstances of the time? Some people seem certain of their own righteousness and condemn the musicians, yet self-righteousness and condemnation are something of which the Nazis were guilty. A contemporary theatre critic in a major newspaper wrote that Strauss was a Quisling. Does he not understand the meaning of the word? Strauss was German, so was Furtwängler. Their country, ruled by a government they disliked and officials who disgusted them, can be easily condemned, but condemning those who lived there as things went from bad to worse is another matter entirely. Was Strauss a "f***ing Nazi"? Was Furtwängler? These plays should inspire us to examine ourselves and our world. Bigotry is alive and well. While the Nazis rejected a group of academics from the universities simply because they were Jewish, there are academics in England today who would reject another group of academics simply because they live in Israel. Fortunately, the bigots today are not in power. They don't make the laws. The Nazis did.