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LONDON – Nazis have crept into this city’s theaters during the past month, glowering with murderous hatred and occasionally singing a song or two. Their arrival was perhaps inevitable in a town where life on the stage tends to echo the word on the street.

Late January brought a swarm of public events and television programs commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps and the 50th anniversary of the funeral of Winston Churchill, the avatar of British heroism in World War II. Reflections on the Holocaust and the persistence of anti-Semitism in Europe have surfaced frequently in print and on the web.

And two shows that have opened recently offer emotionally charged portraits of Jewish men on the run from, or standing up to, Nazi persecutors: Mark Hayhurst’s “Taken at Midnight” — a historical drama in which a tenacious German mother (played by Penelope Wilton) attempts to save her political prisoner son – and “The Grand Tour,” a revival of a seldom-seen musical flop from 1979 about a determined Polish Jew trying to escape from France in 1940.

The productions differ radically in aspect. “Taken at Midnight,” at the venerable Theater Royal Haymarket in the West End, is a stately, somber piece in which characters face off with raised chins and resonant declarations of principles. “The Grand Tour,”’ which has been resurrected by the tiny and prodigiously resourceful Finborough Theater, is a bizarrely jaunty song-and-dance spectacle wherein terrified people whistle a happy tune (by Jerry Herman, the composer of “Hello, Dolly!,” no less).

What the shows have in common is a dogged sentimental spirit that does its best to extract a glimmer of light from an indelibly dark time. They are, in a strange way, comfort shows, less likely to leave audiences reeling from an awareness of brutal inhumanity than reassured by the existence of humane courage. Each dares you to watch without shedding a few tears.

“Taken at Midnight,” which originated at the Chichester Festival Theater and is directed with severe elegance by Jonathan Church, is the more obviously honorable and conventional effort. It is inspired by the real-life campaign of Irmgard Litten (Ms. Wilton), a woman of liberal persuasion and a will of steel, to free her son, Hans (Martin Hutson), from imprisonment in a series of concentration camps.

Hans was an anti-Fascist lawyer (whose father was Jewish) who was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933 for having subpoenaed (and, by most accounts made a fool of) Adolf Hitler as a witness during a trial two years earlier, involving acts of violence by Brownshirts. “Midnight” unfolds as a counterpoint of scenes showing Hans in prison, where he is systematically tortured and humiliated, and Irmgard working tirelessly to secure his release.

Mr. Hayhurst, making his debut as a playwright, is a successful author of television dramas (with titles like “The Man Who Crossed Hitler” and “London’s Burning”) and documentaries. “Midnight” displays his talent for condensing research on complicated subjects into briskly paced stretches of exposition that lucidly cover a range of historical and thematic bases.

The script also shows a perhaps unavoidable tendency to condense complicated people into the sums of their emblematic gestures. No one can fault the radiant professionalism of Ms. Wilton, a marvelous London stage star best known to American audiences as Isobel Crawley, another embodiment of maternal fierceness and progressive politics, in television’s “Downton Abbey.”

But it’s hard to mine much variety from a character who admits her fanaticism has turned her into a monomaniac. Ms. Wilton sustains a ramrod posture and immaculate diction throughout, with only a tell-tale moisture of the eyes and occasional, carefully controlled catch in the throat to betray the sorrow that consumes her character.

Irmgard may be from an old Prussian family. But her upright, commanding stoicism exudes the familiar, bracing air of upper-middle-class stoicism that remains one of Britain’s most popular cultural exports. It is telling that Dr. Conrad (John Light), the Gestapo officer with whom Irmgard lobbies for years on behalf of her son, finally explodes in a fury of class resentment against what he perceives as her aristocratic entitlement.

And as a defiant, learned and unbreakable figure of virtue, Mr. Hutson’s handsome, ever-eloquent Hans emerges as a sort of “Man for All Seasons” type of martyr. Devotees of “Masterpiece Theater” should feel perfectly at home with “Taken at Midnight.”

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A more winsome, willfully humble martyr is at the center of “The Grand Tour,” which had but a short life on Broadway 30-some years ago. That’s Jacobowsky (an engagingly low-key Alastair Brookshaw, in a role created by Joel Grey), a scholarly Polish Jew who has spent most of his life as a displaced person of uncommon survival skills and resilience.

He finds himself in France as it is falling to the Nazis and strikes up an uneasy alliance with a Polish army officer, Colonel Stjerbinsky (Nic Kyle), a nobleman and, unfortunately, an anti-Semite. The Colonel is carrying papers on which the fate of the Polish resistance depends and which must be delivered to the British.

Accompanied by the beauteous Marianne (Zoe Doano), the Colonel’s fiancée, this odd couple eludes the Nazis by a lively and improbable series of subterfuges that includes a stint as circus performers. On the road, Jacobowsky develops what he knows is a hopeless love for Marianne and wins over the rigid and prejudiced Colonel before the final curtain and a tear-jerking act of quiet heroism.

Much is made throughout of Jacobowsky’s endless inventiveness, which is felicitously matched here by Thom Southerland’s production. The stage of the Finborough, which has developed a reputation as one of London’s most fecund fringe theaters, is the size of an efficiency-apartment kitchen.

Yet with a multi-doored set (by Phil Lindley), a cast of 11 and two keyboards, this production makes the requisite tour of its title at a sprightly and melodious clip. Featuring a book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble (adapted from S.N. Behrman’s English adaptation of Franz Werfel’s “Jacobowsy and the Colonel”), “The Grand Tour” cannot reconciles its chipper tone with its grim subject matter.

You can understand why it is only now making its European debut. Its depiction of the gentle, whimsical Jacobowksy summons uncomfortable memories of Hollywood’s portrayal of sweetly self-effacing, self-sacrificing Jews in the early 1940s.

In a full-dress production this musical, which features a tinkling score by Mr. Herman that is part music-box and part music-hall (anticipating his work on the later hit “La Cage aux Folles”), would surely cloy beyond sufferance. Mr. Southerland’s once-over-lightly, picture-postcard production provides an ideal means for sampling a nearly forgotten show that tunefully flirts with tastelessness.