大象传媒

The result, from Henry VI to A Very English Scandal, is that historical individuals will need to be merged into composite characters – one name, whether real or imagined, to carry the standpoints of several like-minded participants. A minor simplification without any historical truth being invalidated.

Invented characters

So, as I sat trying to distil the gargantuan, 18-month process of the Nuremberg Trial, from first proposal to verdict, I knew some characters would need to be wholly invented. Just as Emily Watson’s leading character in Chernobyl represents a merger of a whole team of Soviet scientists, I created Sergeant Monelli of the 391st Anti-Aircraft Battalion to represent the hundreds of soldiers involved in tracking down the defendants across war-ravaged Europe – he voices the feelings and responses of them all.

And I invented the Honourable Diana Ravenscourt to represent the unsung army of women essential to the bureaucratic undertaking – she takes the minutes for Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, who, as Attorney General, steered the London negotiations to create the court.

The gain of this flexibility is that almost every significant statement or attitude in the drama is verbatim or sourced. Time and again, in the recording studio, actors would say to me “That’s a great line” to which I could only reply, limply, “I wish I’d written it.”

The British Prosecuting Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials in Germany, 1st December 1945. From left to right (back row) Major J. Harcourt Barrington, Major Elwyn Jones, MP, E. G. Robey, Lieutenant Colonel J. M. G. Griffith-Jones, Colonel H. J. Phillimore; (front row) Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross, and G. D. Roberts, KC.

Photo © Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Having now written many historical dramas – from Reagan’s shock summit in Reykjavik with Gorbachev, to the last desperate days of the Prague Kindertransport – it’s crucially important to me that every single "load-bearing" line is sourced in this way and conveys a totally viable historical truth, even if now spoken by an ‘invented’ character.

And sometimes, existing individuals have to be merged.

Just as A Very English Scandal coalesced the standpoints of differing MPs into single characters, I merged all the British, French and Russian prosecutors into three individuals. They would be the single, identifiable mouthpiece for all their nations' court utterances (I couldn’t do the same with the American lawyers because I chose to dramatise a crucial tactical argument between them). So it would be Rudenko for the USSR, Dubost for France and Maxwell-Fyfe, who was present for every day of the trial, for the UK.

The result is that eagle-eared British listeners will especially notice that, when I get to the British closing speech, Maxwell-Fyfe continues even though it was in fact delivered by the UK’s new Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross. Shawcross had more than enough in his in-tray (the legislation to create the NHS, for starters) so he graciously allowed his Tory opponent Maxwell-Fyfe to continue as de facto Chief Prosecutor. According to the transcript, Shawcross only spoke on three of the trial’s 218 days, yet the last few paragraphs of his speech were some of the most heart-rending uttered in that courtroom. So was it fair, even at this poignant moment, to deny him his role?

"When Shawcross arrived in Nuremberg at the beginning of July he took the team’s material...” (The Nuremberg Trial by Ann Tusa and John Tusa, quoting the British Prosecution Minutes of 28th May). And while the Tusas go on to say that he “wrote it into a speech of oratorical and forensic distinction” I felt that both the standpoint and the attitude belonged to the entire team of British lawyers.

In other words, no historiographical crime would be committed if, for dramatic smoothness, the words were uttered by the actor playing Maxwell-Fyfe – introduced here as merely “the British Prosecutor” and, for the audience, the all-purpose voice of the British Prosecution Team. And it would crucially mean that the audience would remain undistracted by a switch of voice and fully absorbed that witness testimony. And, above all, this is the historical truth I wanted to tell.