Last Updated on September 11, 2025
3.5 out of 5.0 starsThe Führer is psychoanalysed at Upstairs at the Gatehouse.
When Adolf Hitler lies on Sigmund Freud’s couch and begins to talk about his dreams, one wonders whether the course of history might have been different.
Such is the conceit of the new play by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, co-creators of hit TV comedies Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart. Their newest and, in their words, “most challenging” play is based on a meeting between Freud and a young Hitler that – remarkably – could have happened, but never did.
In 1905, a six-year-old Hitler was taken to his local GP due, in part, to persistent bed-wetting. His father had been beating him. The doctor informed Hitler’s mother, Klara, that there was a clinic in Vienna – run by Dr Sigmund Freud – that might be able to help. But Hitler’s father, Alois, refused.
At Upstairs at the Gatehouse, history is rewritten: Alois reluctantly agrees. Klara and Adolf travel to Vienna, where Dr Freud identifies the child’s bruising and recommends that the beatings stop. His advice is not well received, but Adolf is soon afforded relief when his father dies. What transpires is a decades-long Oedipal relationship between a young Hitler and an older Freud. The psychoanalyst becomes fascinated by the wounded child’s insatiable desire to take revenge against his father, but is unable to see the catastrophic potential of his rage. Hitler is equally fascinated by Freud, the father figure from whom he seeks admiration while simultaneously rejecting it. The hope to be healed clings on with an ever-loosening grip, while his megalomania and antisemitism grow inexorably.
The imagined scenario is clever – pulling together the real but parallel life stories of Hitler and Freud into a single, plausible timeline. The conversations are witty and the relationships convincing; one genuinely believes the father-son dynamic between Jonathan Tafler’s Freud and Sam Mac’s Hitler.
Brendan Lyle is highly amusing as Otto Rank, Freud’s sycophantic assistant, and Nesba Crenshaw is suitably stoic as the doctor’s wife. A brief cameo by Carl Jung, played by Neil Chinneck, adds yet more academically astute comedy. Freud’s apartment in Vienna is brought to life by Hannah Danson, made all-the-more convincing by the psychoanalyst’s London apartment being just a stone’s throw away from the Highgate theatre.
The central performances reduce two enormous figures in history to human form. Mac’s Hitler never truly grows up; he maintains a childish air until the end, even when he becomes, in his own words, “the most powerful man in the world”. Tafler’s Freud provides a counterpoint; a professor steadfast in his humility despite being labelled by everyone else as a pioneering intellectual. The concurrent admiration and rejection between the two men is played skilfully.
The story enacted in Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler is framed as a “fantasy” of Freud’s daughter Anna, played by Ruby Ablett. By inventing the fantasy, the play posits a possible explanation for Hitler’s development; beaten at home, he could never shake the shadow of his authoritarian father. It seems a simplistic suggestion. But Sigmund himself admits at the end that in failing to predict the extent of Hitler’s evil, his interpretation of the Führer’s mind was inadequate. Perhaps, then, Anna’s fantasy is equally unable to decode the enigma.
It is to the credit of the writing that it is able to take an incomprehensible, almost mythic Hitler, so credibly humanize him before one’s eyes, and then return him just as he was – beyond the grasp of intellectual understanding.
Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler runs at Upstairs at the Gatehouse until 28 September 2025.
1 North Road,
London,
N6 4BD
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