David Tennant as John Halder
(Picture: Johan Persson)David Tennant is chillingly plausible as John Halder, the ‘good’ German who gradually accommodates himself to Nazism in this stark and hard-hitting revival of the late CP Taylor’s 1982 drama. Dominic Cooke’s stripped-back, almost abstract production implicates us all in a remorseless journey towards dehumanisation. It’s become more rather than less pertinent after a two-year Covid delay to its planned 2020 premiere.
Tennant has excellent support from Elliot Levey and Sharon Small but deserves praise for lending his primetime, Dr Who celebrity to serious, challenging work like this. Good needs an actor with his easy, unfeigned charm to work properly. I’ve always felt I could see his brain working in the previous stage roles I’ve seen him in, including his admired Hamlet for the RSC. But this is the truest, most natural performance I’ve ever seen him give in a theatre.
Halder is a Frankfurt academic specialising in Goethe, apparently dedicated to his wife and three children, and caring exasperatedly for his blind, demented mother. Yet he confides in his best and only friend Maurice (Levey), a Jewish doctor, about looming anxiety, and about the music that began to appear in his head when Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933.
Maurice, of course, has more pressing concerns, but Halder assures him the Nazis will soon abandon the senseless “anti-Jew hysteria” they stoked to gain power. He digresses into asides, sometimes talking to himself, sometimes to us, likeable even as his veneer of decency slips.
It transpires Halder poured his frustrations with his mother into a novel advocating euthanasia. He’s flattered when it gets attention in the highest echelons at the Reichstag. Similarly flattered, he leaves his wife for a devoted student and they move into Maurice’s summerhouse. Well, Halder reasons, Maurice can’t use it under the new restrictions. He has a reasonable justification for everything, eventually even blaming Germany’s Jews for not getting out fast enough.
In Cooke’s version Levey and Small play all the subordinate characters, switching between them mid-scene or mid-sentence, sitting back and beadily watching when not directly involved in a scene. Small is Halder’s wife one minute, his plaintive mother the next, then his lover. With a minor change of posture, voice and lighting, Levey transforms from Maurice into a Nazi bureaucrat. Tennant and Small use their native Scottish accents, Levey his familiar honeyed tones. This isn’t just a play about Germany but about the moral flaws and the capacity for betrayal within us all.
Vicki Mortimer’s set is an angled, strip-lit concrete cell with two hatches. One delivers a deluge of books onto the stage, the other frames a furnace. The sound design covers not only the music Halder hears – brass bands, jazz, Schubert, Mendelsohn - but the pages he turns and the orders he reads, distilling the action down even further. Mostly the actors just sit or stand.
Although grimly funny and studiously banal at times, it progresses inexorably. We all know where it will end, though Taylor – who died aged 52 before the RSC’s original production of Good transferred to the Aldwych Theatre - springs two devastating late surprises. This is an important rather than an enjoyable watch. Kudos to Tennant, Cooke and everyone involved for making it happen.
Harold Pinter Theatre, to Saturday December 24; goodtheplay.com
