Tense play set in study

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32542, 27 February 1971, Page 4

Tense play set in study

The action in “That’s Not My Name,” a tense play in the “Thirty Minute Theatre” series from CHTV3 this evening, takes place in Professor Kolter’s study. In the course of half an hour an elderly man’s entire past is unfolded and all traces of his existence obliterated.

Professor Kolter is a refugee who left Germany in 1948 the same year the mysterious Walter, also a German, disappeared. Years later, into his quiet respectable professor’s world, Kolter admits two strangers who, while obviously not ordinary criminals, nevertheless bully and threaten him until he is completely at their mercy. They probe his past, his love life, his reasons for leaving Germany, every disaster and humiliation, every precious memory and relationship yet, all along, it is quite apparent they know the answers already. As they alternately menace and reassure, they are carefully going through his private papers and tearing up anything that relates to his identity, past and present.

The professor is utterly bewildered until the very end when it slowly dawns on him that it was no accident that made the strangers persistently call him Walter instead of by his real name, Heinrich. Who is Walter? Why has Heinrich been chosen as sacrificial victim so that Walter may assume his identity? These questions and their answers are the plot of this tense drama of suspense.

Andre Van Gyseghem appears as Kolter with Alfred Burke and George Murcell as the First and Second Men.