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It is April 1945, it is Hitlers birthday and the alcohol is flowing. Gretel sits uninvited doing her duty. She types. She listens. When she listens she worries, so she types. Ilse full of jingoistic intention finds her stoic and can’t see why Gretel fears the ever encroaching Red Army. These women are more than comrades. They are sisters in arms united in a purpose that quickly slips to madness.

This play by Michael Punter takes you into the claustrophobic concrete heart of a dying empire, built on the shoulders of the insane and propped up by acolytes with a promise for a future that will never exist. Under the direction of Adrian Bowd, Bertie Hustwayte and Jackie Eichler take on the roles of Gretel and Ilse, two women forced together through assignment and kept together through kinship. Brains infested with propaganda that make the world to come seem so glamorous and therefore the risk of losing it all the more apocalyptic. What better way to control a society? To engineer an empire?

The characters are women the audience know, they are not monsters, they are secretaries, tiny cogs in a machine that demands absolute loyalty.

This is an opportunity to witness the inner turmoil of those who followed, those who believed and those who would pay for their deeds.

‘The world burned.

They typed’