Writer: C. P. Taylor
Director: Dominic Cook
Johnny Halder hears music in his head. When he meets his mistress for the first time it’s to the tune of Falling In Love Again by Marlene Dietrich. When he sees his Jewish friend for the last time, Mendelssohn’s melancholy violin fills his head. But when he joins the Nazis, he hears a boisterous drinking song. He feels as if he’s arrived.
Halder’s excitement in joining the National Socialist Party is just one of the many chilling moments in C. P. Taylor’s 1981 play Good, revived after Covid delays at the Harold Pinter Theatre with David Tennant in the lead. Starting in 1933 Good traces the career of Halder from a university professor to one of the architects of the Final Solution. Naturally, it’s not an easy watch but Taylor’s script is jagged and the narrative is initially hard to follow. Complicating matters is Dominic Cooke’s decision to reduce the cast to just three actors. Tennant plays only Halder, but Sharon Small and Elliot Levey play all the other roles.
Small has to be Halder’s mother, wife, and mistress. Despite moving from character to character in split seconds, the audience is never in doubt to who she is playing. To the mother she gives a Glaswegian accent. Blind from a thyroid problem and with early signs of dementia, Halder’s mother spends her time in an institution. Halder has no patience with her, preferring she stay in the hospital than live with him and his wife. As Halder’s depressed wife, Small is detached, not quite there. As Anne, his student-turned-lover, Small is understanding, loyal and carefree. Anne is a breath of fresh air for Halder.
Meanwhile Levey is Maurice, Halder’s doctor and friend. As the German government begins to legislate against Jewish people, Maurice asks Halder for help but is told that the situation will resolve itself, that it is nothing but a “temporary racialist aberration”. In a flash, Levey must be a Nazi bigwig praising Halder on his novel that condoned euthanasia under certain conditions.
In a way Small and Levey have to work harder than Tennant, but he has to demonstrate how a relatively good man can commit evil deeds. Halder is first reluctant to join the Nazis, perhaps only acquiescing when he fears that he might lose his job. The Nazis seduce him with flattery and, being a proud man, Halder is unable to resist. Tennant skilfully doesn’t show the precise moment that Halder begins to believe in Nazi rhetoric; it’s such a gradual process that the good man is always, if sometimes only partially, visible. Scarily, in many respects, he hasn’t changed at all.
Creating even more tension is the small space they have to work in. Vicki Mortimer’s set of grey marble-like walls pushes the actors right to the from of the stage, firstly demonstrating the claustrophobia of Halder’s home life, and then Frankfurt itself, increasingly under the control of the Nazis. With so many door and handles, one expects the set to yield surprises, and yet, these reveals are few, again underlining Halder’s regimented world.
Early on in in the play, Anne tells Halder than she finds Goethe’s Faust ‘banal’. There is more excitement, she says, in the minutiae of ordinary life. One of the greatest versions of Faust is, of course by Thomas Mann (whose books were burnt in Berlin in 1933) and his Dr Faustus is also about music and the rise of Nazi Germany. Good, too, could be seen as update of the Faust myth where a good man sells his soul to the Devil. Tennant shows us just how easy this deal could be made.
Runs until 24 December 2022
