Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia, review: Adrian Edmondson is hypnotically odd in this risky black comedy

Is it OK to posit – dramatically – the funny side of Nazi occupation and horrors of fascism? Josh Azouz’s arrestingly titled black comedy is the latest, high-risk attempt by a writer to go where angels fear to tread.

Most notoriously (but surprise-successfully), on screen and stage in The Producers, Mel Brooks deployed an uber bad-taste Broadway musical – Springtime for Hitler – as a key narrative ingredient. Recent controversy was stirred by Jojo Rabbit – a 2019 comedy drama concerning a Hitler Youth junior and a Jewish girl hiding in the attic. US TV saw a longish running Sixties sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, set in a Nazi POW camp; closer to home, ’Allo ’Allo! presumed to find mirth amid occupied France.

We’re in very sensitive times now, though. Get it wrong and you can be cancelled. It perhaps helps if the writer is Jewish (Sephardi Jewish) – as is the case here – though that’s no free pass; it gets your foot in the door, so to speak.

Alighting on the period when Tunisia – hitherto administered by the Vichy regime – succumbed to the Nazi jackboot circa 1943, as the war raged in North Africa, Azouz, 35, might be thought to have put himself in a no-win situation: the louder the laughter, surely, the greater the howls of protest ensuing. And it’s as if he’s inviting walk-outs with the opening scene alone – a Jewish man (Pierro Niel-Mee’s sommelier Victor), confined up to the neck in a labour-camp, trading narky repartee with an Arab friend (Ethan Kai’s Youssef) sent to urinate on his sun-baked head.

The writer’s tactic, though, is to draw much of the evening’s vicious entertainment (that sadistic opening scenario included) from the psychopathic carry-on of a Nazi officer known as Grandma on account of his cosy habit of knitting for his men. Aimlessly savage (grimly true to wartime type), Grandma takes unperturbed, unhinged delight in barbarity and power-play beneath a civilised veneer; in a long, queasy scene, he turns repellent suitor to Victor’s wife Loys (Yasmin Paige).

Channelling his old anarchic energy, Adrian Edmondson creates a leering, evilly grinning crank of hypnotic oddness. The riveting characterisation allows the piece to tilt in response-testing ways between caricature and complexity. You get a sense that the conditions of occupation could be so arbitrary as to be absurd; that you’re being tempted to collude in amoral entertainment, and it’s not quite so easy to resist; also that it’s knowingly miles away from the full monstrous reality – a plot takes shape, involving questions of escape, but it’s loaded with glaring implausibility. The invitation is there to laugh, then, but laughter carries implications.

Azouz’s approach works, just; no small achievement. You keep watching; the rest of the cast in Eleanor Rhode’s production (presented on an arid, yet imaginatively fertile, array of wooden box-units) muster vital human detail as well as comic touches. The deficit, though, is that having noticed a fascinating, under-told side of the war, the chewy socio-political context – especially questions of Arab and Jewish self-determination – feels scantly served, and bolted-on.

Some may complain that the Nazis’ victims demand a far more sensitive hearing – I suspect the theatre should brace itself. My more prosaic thought is that there’s a simpler, richer drama of ideas and emotional conflict crying to be heard inside this funny-peculiar fable.

Until Sept 18. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk