Over two series between 1972 and 1974, Colditz told the stories of captured Allied officers, their wide and varied escape attempts and their complex relationships with their German captors. ‘Tweedledum’, its best remembered episode, depicts Wing Commander Marsh (Michael Bryant) feigning insanity in the hope of repatriation. In the process, he wreaks havoc on his genuine mental state, and gains an unlikely protector in the Nazi corporal observing his behaviour. A gripping story, brilliantly realised, it encapsulates much of what we cherish about this age of BBC drama. It’s understandably well-loved by actors too, being, as it is, about acting.
The entire episodes hinges on Marsh’s need to deceive all around him, including those to whom he floats the scheme. So he deceives us too, and as his sanity grows increasingly precipitous, we have no certainty as to whether we are seeing interior anguish or exterior front. In its first cut from the hatching of the plan to Marsh’s first performative trance, the episode initiates a game with us. At once we understand that, like those around Marsh, we can only see the outside. Will he cross the threshold? For the purposes of drama, we expect he will – but how would we know? A sane man won’t tell us, and a madman can’t. An exceedingly clever seduction of the audience.
Marsh’s behaviour becomes steadily more erratic and extreme, yet even then we cannot be fully certain of its true nature. He allows himself to be demeaned on numerous occasions in front of the officers and inmates. He goes out into the courtyard having had a bowl of porridge emptied over his head by Corporal Hartwig (Bernard Kay), later on wetting himself and whimpering like a schoolboy as the Kommandant (Bernard Hepton) greets an important visitor. The timing of that latter incident could well be calculated, triggering as it does a more serious consideration of Marsh’s condition.
But ambiguity is maintained at all times. One moment, Marsh gives the Doc (Geoffrey Palmer) a knowing wink, the next moment he unexpectedly lashes out at another officer: “I never knew he was so strong.” Michael Bryant keeps us guessing, as Marsh isolates himself from the group (at first deliberately). Imposing remarkable self-restraint, he stays silent for most of the episode, communicating what little he chooses, or is able to, facially, physically – not least his apparent regression into a second childhood. It’s no surprise that he received a BAFTA nomination.
The programme does offer some glimpses of the inside as Marsh looks to the sky and toys with a model aeroplane. Fading to footage of planes and birds flying through the air, we see Marsh’s desire to fly again. This is conflated with his witness to an athletic prisoner (Stuart Fell) leaping his way to freedom over a high fence. He and Marsh’s escapes are mirrored, two sides of the same coin. While one flies, Marsh’s desire to do the same plunges him into a prison of a far worse kind. All the while, the same harpsichord piece he plays over and over on a gramophone echoes through his head (in an otherwise musically sparse programme) as he imagines his flight. It forms a part of his fantasy, but he first uses it repetitively to drive his fellow officers to distraction, becoming ultimately unable to stop himself from listening to it. Entrapped, we can find new comforts, only for those comforts to strengthen the trap further.
We can never be sure of its final meaning to Marsh, nor indeed of anything about him by the end. We can be sure, however, of Corporal Hartwig, the Nazi assigned to evaluating Marsh’s behaviour, having before seen his brother confined to an asylum. It’s another cunning trick of the episode. Ostensibly focused on Marsh, the story cannot ground itself in him – the whole point is that we are outside him, and he must remain a mystery. The emotional centre of ‘Tweedledum’, therefore, is a Nazi, and it is Hartwig’s emotional development that pulls us through the episode rather than Marsh’s.
Hartwig’s behaviour is at first that of a brutish bully, emptying Marsh’s bowl of porridge onto him as mentioned above, after which he stamps on Marsh’s model plane. Yet at this stage, Hartwig is perhaps the only one of them to have had a true taste of madness, in losing his brother, who with his performed insanity Marsh is now insulting. We can look on Hartwig’s behaviour, then, as a justified defence of his brother, while Marsh’s actions earn less of our sympathy on reflection, at least until he reaps his terrible reward.
But it is as Marsh enters into a genuine decline, pitiful in his growing helplessness, that Hartwig finds repentance for his previous unpleasantness. Reliving the loss of his brother, he bestows kindness on Marsh that he cannot on his sibling. Gifting him a new model plane to replace the broken one, he sublimates his absent fraternal relationship here. It’s no clearer than the scene in the courtyard where Marsh is left out of a football game. Too slow to join in, the other players kick the ball away from him, and Marsh cries in the corner, the lost boy. At once, Hartwig steps in to look after his charge. Speaking as Kay always does, with the deep, comforting voice of someone wiser than you, Hartwig reassures Marsh and holds him, stemming his own tears as the camera pulls back, unable to avert its gaze from the embrace of two lonely men.
That corner is the spot of their goodbye as well, as Marsh is successfully repatriated at terrible cost. It has become by now the place where he shelters from the world, the place where he had the greatest kindness bestowed upon him. It’s a heartbreaking spectacle, as Marsh, the last remnants of himself gone, bellows that he won’t go (“I live here!”), and Hartwig, with a kindly smile, loses his brother all over again. As the escort drives away, he’s left alone, his back turned to us, gently grinding his fist against a wall. His true face is hidden from us, as indeed it has been throughout the episode – another piece of skilful restraint and powerful understatement.
Given Bryant’s BAFTA nomination, it seems unjust that Kay didn’t receive one two – for one performance is nothing to the story without the other. While Bryant’s performance as Marsh is the bleak tragedy of the episode, Kay’s turn as Hartwig offers the hope that makes it bearable. ‘Tweedledum’ at its most basic can be described as the tale of a man driving himself to insanity, but it’s really the story too of a man finding catharsis by reliving the loss of a loved one. And, like much of the programme, it is a story of human relationships of depth and complexity can flourish across even the most terrible divide in the most terrible of times.
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