If there were a theatre prize for grabby titles, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran would win it. Much as Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, spotting that James Joyce, Lenin and the artist Tristan Tzara coincided in Zurich in 1917, audaciously fantasised their interactions, Marks and Gran even more boldly posit that, if Adolf Hitler had seen a shrink in Vienna in the early 20th century, it might plausibly have been Sigmund Freud.
Beginning with a title-explaining scene in which an Austrian mother seeks advice on her young son’s nocturnal bedwetting and nightmares, Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler contrives encounters across three decades: with Hitler as a patient; house-painter; hiker near the Freuds’ summer house in Berchtesgaden (giving, it is implied, ideas to Hitler); war-wounded corporal; and, ultimately, Führer.
