Conville & Walsh

When German student, Andreas Hönig, arrives to study late-Romantic literature at Cambridge in the mid 1980s, he hopes to discover what kind of man he wants to be. Leaving behind in Berlin a father who has never recovered from his wife’s sudden death and a younger brother who is becoming increasingly involved with right-wing causes, Andreas has no idea that before a year is out he will be earning his living as a Hitler impersonator. Uncomfortable at first, he begins to reason that, by de-mystifying Hitler through comedy, he can help Germans to come to terms with their guilt and help the British to understand better the German mentality.

Andreas meets and falls in love with Rose, an improbably tall fellow student, and after graduation they set up a look-alike agency – supplying performers who resemble celebrities for corporate entertainment and comedy clubs. Andreas’ Hitler act is the most successful of them all, but sickened that Rose increasingly expects to be dominated by ‘Hitler’ in bed and confronted by his brother’s neo-nazism, he decides to hang up the moustache at the height of his success. It proves to be a disastrous move, culminating in a final, drunken bout of violent love-making which leaves Rose dead and Andreas imprisoned for manslaughter.

It is not until the present day that Andreas is able to tell his story to Alexandra, a young literacy assistant at the prison where he lives out a life sentence. Alexandra has her own complicated personal life to come to terms with but teams up with her flatmate and reluctant love-interest, Gareth, to translate and unpick the bizarre story. As they get closer to the truth, they discover that the gap between impersonation and emulation, between role-play and real-life, between comedy and something far darker, is all to easily crossed.