A new Liverpool theatre company – Heirs of Banquo Productions CIC – will stage its first production in January – based on the true story of a German theologian who ‘sold his soul to Hitler’s loathsome cause’. Tony McDonough reports
A dark tale of a man who “sold his soul” to Adolf Hitler is the subject of a new play coming to Liverpool in January.
KITTEL: Doktor Faustus of the Third Reich has been written by Charlotte Pickering who was also the author of the novel Messiah of the Slums. Charlotte Pickering is the pen name of Liverpool music tutor and former teacher Catherine Harrison.
Showing at the city’s Unity Theatre on January 23 and 24, 2026, KITTEL: Doktor Faustus of the Third Reich is based on the true story of Gerhard Kittel, the stellar German theologian, and a Jewish studies specialist, who sold his soul to Adolf Hitler’s loathsome cause.
Chilling and timely, this reimagining of the Faust legend illustrates how very easily the public sphere can become contaminated to the point where civility collapses altogether.
A family man and celebrated scholar, Professor Gerhard Kittel was a world authority on Jewish scripture, culture and history. He was admired by Christian and Jewish scholars at home and abroad.
Yet in 1933, he joined the Nazi party and wrote his infamous Jewish Question book which mulled extermination as a possible “solution” to Germany’s so-called Jewish problem. By 1936, Kittel was a senior player in the Nazi research institutes charged with using pseudoscience to underpin the Final Solution.
Catherine Harrison believes the play offers a warning of allowing extremism to fester and grow in society unchecked. In recent weeks there have been murders of Jewish people in Manchester and at Bondi Beach in Australia.
“KITTEL offers a compelling scrutiny of antisemitism and serves as a stark warning for our own time. It presents the precise process by which toxic narratives took hold and enabled Hitler,” she told LBN.
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“This is not, I believe, an overstatement of the current situation. Public figures from across the political spectrum have identified worrying signs of fascism in our political and cultural sphere.”
This play is being staged by Heirs of Banquo Productions CIC, a new local theatre company facilitated by an endowment from the Otto Jacobs Bequest.