The Deputy
Brooks Atkinson Theater, NYC, 1964
Role: Father Riccardo Fontana

Wikipedia describes The Deputy as a controversial drama written in 1963 by Rolf Hochhuth that portrayed Pope Pius XII as a hypocrite who remained silent about The Holocaust. Much controversy surrounded the play worldwide. Accounts of heightened security at the theater and other information is available at The Brettish Empire.

A May 1964 Associated Press story tells about the toll the play took on Jeremy: (Full text of article: Star of "The Deputy" finds terror in each evening's performance PDF)

[Jeremy Brett has] the focal role in Broadway's hit drama, "The Deputy." His degree of involvement is blistering. 

"Each performance is a personal experience. I'm in a state of total absorption. There are moments when I get almost hysterical."

Since the play opened in February, Brett has lost 14 pounds, his sleep has become fitful. 

His torment centers on the drama's graphic description of Germanic atrocities. "I'm a rather idealistic person who would rather not believe human nature could sink so low. I was most vulnerable to what the play recalls -- and I can't get used to it. At the same time, even though it may hurt like hell and be hard to do, if the theatre is to survive, such topics must be aired."

Time magazine describes the play:

The hero of the play is a priest, a kind of angry young martyr of burning faith and compassion who deliberately pins the yellow Star of David to his cassock and eventually goes to his death in the gas chambers. Father Riccardo Fontana (Jeremy Brett) is a Jesuit serving with the papal nuncio in Berlin when a distracted SS lieutenant bursts into an afternoon tea and begins a semihysterical recital of the statistical horrors of the "factories of death for people" at Treblinka and Belzec.

The troubled young priest goes to Rome, where his aristocratic father and a cardinal friend are close advisers of the Pope. ... In his uncompromising way, the young priest finally sees Pius and begs him to damn Hitler openly. The Pope knows Hitler's wrongs, but he reminds Father Fontana that "a diplomat must see with discretion."

As with Troilus and Cressida, Jeremy had the honor of being the subject of a Hirschfeld drawing.

Click the images above and below for larger view.

A New York Times review from Feb. 27, 1964, praised JB's performance: "Jeremy Brett brings fire and dedication to the role of Father Fontana." The review further noted that the version of The Deputy performed on Broadway was shrunk from its original five-act length, "which would take something like eight hours to perform." This version lasted a little more than two and a half hours and "sharpens the plays incendiary thesis."

An April 30, 1964, review in the San Mateo (California) Times had this description of the play and Jeremy's performance:

The Deputy is one of the greatest morality plays the 29th Century will produce. ... "The Deputy" is a cry against the apathy that exists in all of us.

Brilliantly staged, beautifully acted, the play holds the audience for all of its three hours....

Brett, a young British actor, turns in a heart-wrenching performance as the young Jesuit ... who is attached to the papal legation in Berlin in the early 1940s. He hears from SS Lt. Kurt Gerstein (Thomas A. Carlin) who has been attached to Auchswitz, a plea for papal intervention, but the papal nuncio in Berlin is helpless. 

He returns later to Gerstein's apartment and give his cassock and diplomatic passport to Jacobson, a Jew who has been hiding in the apartment. In return, he receives the yellow star of David which marked all Jews in German- occupied countries. 

From that time on, Brett becomes master of the play although not of his own destiny. A tall, frail man, he glows with ascetic cause.

... Father Fontana's final meeting [with the pope] where he pins on the star of David and joins the Italian Jews leaving Rome is electric.

Internet Broadway Database page