David Tennant and Elliot Levey are perfectly matched as the ‘good’ German and the Jew in this psychological drama set in Nazi Germany
It was back in summer 2020 when I first got excited about the revival of Good by Glasgow-born Jewish playwright CP Taylor. David Tennant plays the quasi-title role of this story of "how a ‘good’ man gets caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich”, as Taylor himself described what he subtitled ‘a tragedy’ at its first outing over 40 years ago.
Tennant, known for playing warm, personable roles, has added killers, both cold-blooded and accidental, to his CV. As the serial killer Dennis Nilsen in 2020's Des and, most recently, in Inside Man, as a vicar who finds himself attempting to dispose of his son’s tutor when he fears she’s intending (wrongly) to expose the youth as a viewer of child pornography.
These roles offer a clue to the chill at the heart of Tennant's university lecturer John Halder, who has an apparent bonhomie towards Maurice, his Jewish analyst and confidant – a gripping performance from Elliot Levey, who also plays most of the other male roles, including Nazis. Dominic Cooke’s powerful, stripped-back production reduces the cast to just three main players in Vicki Mortimer’s bleak metallic set. Sharon Small is excellent, playing the three women in Halder’s life – his needy wife Helen, dementia-stricken mother and 23-year-old student lover Anne. This multi-role-playing strategy, alongside the prison-like environment, only serves to reinforce the impression that the action is taking place inside Halder’s head.
This is heightened by the lecturer's admission that he constantly hears music – popular strains from both marching and big bands to classical works, including Mendelssohn (Jewish) and Wagner (a favourite of the Nazis) – which he shares with the audience thanks to clever sound design by Tom Gibbons. It’s a drama that demands close concentration, with lightning switches between Halder’s thoughts and conversations with family, high-ranking Nazis (including Adolf Eichmann) and, above all, Maurice.
Halder has written a pro-euthanasia novel, possibly to fictionalise his very real frustration with his mother and her condition. It attracts the attention of the Nazi upper echelons as plans to eliminate those they see as society’s undesirables crystallize. Their enthusiastic endorsement is the prelude to an invitation to lead a scheme to initiate planned assisted suicides, a prelude to the Final Solution. So Halder is on a slippery slope that leads him from dismissing “all that anti-Jew rubbish” in confidential conversations with Maurice – who is becoming more embattled and desperate as the net closes in on Germany’s Jews – to justifying Kristallnacht to Maurice “as a basically humane action … to shock the Jews into the reality of their situation in Nazi Germany. Tomorrow morning they’ll be running for their lives out of this country.”
Tennant excels at embodying the question at the heart of the play. How does a good man find himself doing bad things? Halder’s no saint and it’s his vanity and solipsistic nature that leads him to succumb to flattery, to be gradually sucked into enthusiastically joining the perpetrators. There’s a positive chill in the air as his position hardens. Levey’s performance is extraordinary as he first confides to Halder, “My fellow Jews. I can’t stand them. My best friends are gentiles and Nazis,” but later in mounting desperation, agonises, “It’s not real, a Germany without Jewish doctors.” As the action moves inexorably to a possibly all too predictable conclusion and locale, the temperature seems to drop several degrees further. A must-see warning from history.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Johan Persson
Good runs until Saturday 24 December. 7.30pm, 2.30pm (Sat only, plus 26 Oct & 14 Dec). From £20. Harold Pinter Theatre, SW1Y 4DN. goodtheplay.com