There is more than a hint of Shakespearean drama in The Dasslers, a new play written by Jamie Radford and directed by Sapphire Shoferpoor, at The Bridewell Theatre.
We have two feuding brothers whose differing ambitions and sibling rivalries serve, over the course of one highly charged emotional evening, to shatter both their business and their familial unity forever.
So how did two brothers, both alike in commitment and ambition, in fair Bavarian Herzogenaurach, where we lay our scene, end up as star-crossed competitors and bitter adversaries?
The Dasslers is a historical drama which tells the true story of German brothers Adolf (Adi) and Rudolf (Rudi) Dassler, who changed the world of sport but destroyed their family in the process. You may not have heard of them, but you will have heard of the companies which were created and rose from the ashes of their ruptured and irredeemably severed relationship… Adidas and Puma.
It is 1948. In post-war Germany, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler have successfully rebuilt their sports shoe business under the watchful eyes of the American occupiers and are seeking to reintegrate their company as a key supplier to the influential US Athletics team, shortly to participate in the first post-war Olympic Games in London.
There is a hopeful symmetry here for the brothers, as the original key breakthrough for their business was the success of their supplying Jesse Owens with his footwear at the 1936 Berlin Games; a commercial breakthrough certainly, but one fraught with political difficulties as the incredible feats of the non-Aryan Owens did not endear him, or those associated with him, such as his suppliers, to the Nazi hierarchy.
Despite their differences, the brothers complement each other perfectly; the intense technical perfectionist Adi obsesses over studs, spikes and the position of stripes on the shoes in his unceasing devotion to the development of ever better and more sophisticated models and maximising production capacity.
Rudi, by contrast, is the ultimate salesman. Driven, charismatic, urbane, and immeasurably self-confident, Rudolf Dassler is the antithesis of his brother, obsessed with status and the pursuit of power, influence and recognition. His ambitious, ruthless Machiavellian streak becomes more pronounced as the play develops and sets the course for the irreconcilable destruction to come.
In short, Adi makes the shoes, Rudi sells them.
The brothers’ very different attitudes towards life and business are set out early in the narrative. Adi’s assertion that “No one looks after you except your family” is sneeringly countered by Rudi’s belief that “No one looks after you except for yourself”.
Into this uneasy relationship, the Dassler brothers’ lawyer arrives to deliver an ultimatum. Their key customers, the US athletics team, whilst acknowledging that the German shoe is the best, are concerned about shipping hold-ups, with delivery made less certain by long testing, frequent design tweaking and production line fine-tuning by Adi. The Americans are demanding that a single, unequivocal voice lead the firm and eliminate delivery delays. The die is cast. Adi or Rudi? Technical creator or salesman? An answer is needed by 6 a.m. the following morning.
Or is there perhaps more to the situation than is initially apparent?
The context within which the action takes place is also critical to the development of the narrative. This is Germany, barely three years after the Götterdämmerung of the Nazi collapse. The War casts a long and painful shadow.
We learn that during the war, Rudi was the only brother called to the front. Adi, on the other hand, is considered indispensable to the smooth conversion of the Dasslers’ business to the total war economy demanded by the Nazi state and is allowed to continue running the business.
Away on the Eastern Front, Rudolf suspects that his brother is plotting to force him out of the business. Mistrust continues to grow, and future battle lines are drawn.
When Rudolf is imprisoned after the war on suspicion of espionage, the rupture deepens. In revenge, Rudi denounces his brother to the post-war denazification committee as an active supporter of and influential participant in the Nazi regime. Only the testimony of employees (some of whom were Jewish) prevented the postwar loss of the company and a prison sentence for Adi. Reconciliation between the brothers after such trauma has since remained fragile and, under increasing commercial pressures, now becomes totally unsustainable.
This is a play that, to be truly successful, has to devote a lot of the narrative to explanation and exposition. There is a lot of information to impart in 70 minutes, in addition to maintaining the dramatic intensity of the piece, and to some extent the production suffers from the need to shoehorn explanatory plot into the dialogue. This occasionally serves to dilute the thrust and brio of the exchanges.
That having been said, both Finn Samuels as Rudi and Edward Tarling as Adi deliver strong performances, delineating the key psychological differences between the brothers, and adroitly portraying the tensions inherent in the clash between Adi’s fastidious earnestness and Rudi’s ruthless, restless ambition.
The role of the brothers’ respective wives provides a challenge to the actors to rise above established tropes and clichés of the place of women in postwar German society.
Siân Godsmark, as Rudi’s wife Friedl, plays the part of the peacemaker, trying to maintain a degree of structural support to enable the brothers’ relationship somehow to survive against all odds. Her reading of an unsent letter she wrote to the absent Rudi during the war gives an unexpected depth and potency to her desperation for humanity and family loyalty to triumph over naked commercial ambition.
Lula Marsh, as Käthe, takes on the role of the outspoken, strong-willed and candidly forthright loyal wife of Adi with relish. She is under no illusion as to the calculating opportunism of Rudi, and, whilst becoming increasingly despairing of Adi’s seeming inability to stand up for himself and all he has achieved, manages to show a softer side to her nature in her encouragement of Adi to remember why he founded the business in the first place; a moment which rather touchingly clarifies both her love for her husband and her faith in him.
Despite the efforts of the cast, some elements of the dialogue are a tad clunky and add little to the narrative. The fleeting appearance of the Dasslers’ domineering and peevish mother, Pauline (Anne Rutter), whilst serving to underline that Rudi was the favourite son, and Friedl very much the preferred daughter-in-law, seemed unnecessarily distracting.
The positioning within the narrative of a flashback scene taking us to the initial foundation of the business was placed at the end of the play, when it might have been better served as an introductory prologue to the plot, underpinning the successful nature of the operation and providing a clear structural base for the fallout and angst to come.
One further possible methodology of interpretation that future incarnations of this production might consider is the increased use of visual aids to plot development rather than a total reliance upon dialogue. Footage of Jesse Owens’s triumph at the 1936 games and Goebbels’s infamous “Total War” speech of 1943, both referenced in and central to plot development, would have added a fresh dimension to the progress of the narrative. The final coda, detailing the real-life results of the shattering of the Dasslers’ personal and commercial relationship, could have been flashed up onto the back screen as the audience left to emphasise the long-term consequences of what we have just witnessed.
Overall, The Dasslers is an intriguing and thought-provoking piece of theatre. It challenges audiences to consider what is of fundamental importance; is it commercial success and the continuation of an economic legacy, or is it the preservation of personal relationships and strong, durable familial bonds?
It also confronts the moral complexities of personal and professional accommodation with the Nazi era in a powerful and stimulating way.
There is much potential in this play, and, in its current format, a lot to enjoy. Perhaps the acid test of a production such as this lies in whether sufficient interest has been generated to encourage audience members to find out more about what they have seen. In this respect, The Dasslers can be judged a success.
Review by Johnny Oxford
The Dasslers is a sharp, fast-paced historical drama about two brothers who change the world of sport and destroy their own family in the process.
In post-war Germany, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler rebuild their shoe factory under the watchful eyes of the American occupiers and the looming 1948 Olympics. As perfectionist Adi obsesses over studs and stripes and showman Rudi chases power, money and recognition, a single night of accusations, betrayals and impossible choices tears their partnership apart and sets the stage for two global superpowers to emerge; Adidas and Puma.
THE DASSLERS
Bridewell Theatre
21 to 23 May 2026
