THEY BOMBED THEIR OWN CHIPPY

Last updated : 18 August 2006 By Editor
From the Independent's diary column:

It appears to have all the ingredients for West End success: blackmail, sexual failure, swastikas and, crucially, the real-life story of Adolf Hitler's self-promoting Scouse nephew.

Now, after success in New York, the playwright Mark Kassen plans to next year bring Little Willy to London. His hour-long play profiles William Patrick Hitler, pictured, born 1911 in Liverpool to the Führer's half brother, Alois, a waiter.

Willy moved to Germany in the 1930s and shamelessly traded off his moniker to secure plush jobs and seduce gullible young fraüleins. However, he spectacularly fell out with Uncle Adolf after threatening to sell the family secrets to the press.

Willy fled to the US, changed his name and lived in anonymous suburbia until his death in 1987.

"We got unexpectedly large audiences and so much controversy in New York, so we want to bring it to London," Kassen tells me.

"I think people will dig it. If the guy was alive today he'd have a television reality show or a record deal."

The New York Times critic who reviewed Little Willy described Kassen's Hitler Jnr as "a parasitic, failed careerist who had not one moral or political conviction that he wouldn't sell for a dime" - as well as being "sweaty and excitable", and a disappointment in bed.

Quite what Willy's three remaining sons (in Long Island, New York) make of the production remains unclear. They are rumoured to be working on their own account of life as Little Hitlers.