Taking a stab at Albert Steer

Albert Speer rose to be the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. He said of Hitler that if Hitler was capable of friendship he would have been his friend. I think that is slightly disingenuous - they were friends, and very, very close. Speer is also famous for saying at Nuremburg that he knew nothing of the Holocaust, and for escaping hanging to spend 20 years in Spandau Prison.

David Edgar's amazing play is based on the book Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth by the Austrian journalist Gitta Sereny. She spent a lot of time interviewing Speer and his wife before he died in the Eighties.

I would hate to speak for Gitta because she is her best mouthpiece, but what she is trying to do in her work is to understand how these things happened, rather than simply demonise the Germany of that time and believe it could not happen again. To find out how people ended up where they did, and followed by so many.

I play Albert Speer. He survived at Nuremburg because he took responsibility and said I should have known about the Holocaust but I didn't. A lot of people believed him, and a lot of people didn't. I fluctuate. He turned away at some point, and if you turn away then you know there is something you are turning away from.

The play is an epic look at what was, in a way, the defining moment of the 20th century through this man's involvement. And how, at some point, Speer came to the conclusion that he was responsible and tried to come to terms with that. In the end I don't think he did.