We slide into becoming monsters, cut off from the world by the mantras in our heads. This is the main contention of CP Taylor’s 1981 play Good. Now revived with terrific David Tennant – the more acute because the more restrained – as the vague, gently acquiescent professor who drifts apparently seamlessly into becoming an SS officer, it is a finely calibrated evening that does not quite land its punch.
Dominic Cooke is one of Britain’s most exact and wide-ranging directors. His production, delayed by the pandemic, is a meticulous realisation of adamantine ideology and blurred frontiers. Vicki Mortimer’s set is a concrete bunker, drained of any vibrant colour until lit up by the flames of burning books. Her costumes are for the most part equally subdued, so that Tennant’s brown tweed jacket and putty-coloured trousers blend into the low-key palette: it is as if his background has grown him, until, at the end, he puts on full SS uniform – swastika armband on his long leather coat – and sets off for duty at Auschwitz. He has shifted gradually from being slightly uneasy about Hitler’s attitude to the Jews to thinking Kristallnacht was a good thing because it will wake “them” up.
Cooke skilfully suggests that many characters may be indeterminate – as indeed may be their audiences. Elliot Levey, so magnetic last year in Cabaret, inhabits a variety of parts with his understated strength: he is a Jewish friend moving from anxiety to anguish, and a Nazi pushing the idea of euthanasia for anyone who is enfeebled: yes, what a good idea to have the killing room disguised as a bathroom so that no one panics. Versatile Sharon Small is pressed into some overemphatic-ness as she takes on a huge range of parts, often playing her own antagonist: the hero’s undomestic intellectual wife and his Rhine maiden lover; his mother sinking under dementia, and a Nazi apparatchik who would consider her disposable. Meanwhile Tennant, who complains of feeling less than real, is delicately enigmatic, wrapped in an inner life of music that swims unprompted through his head: we hear Marlene Dietrich falling in love again, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Schubert and Bavarian marches. All create a Germanic scenery but nothing directs him to the outside world.
It is good to see a production of this calibre in the West End. Yet this is an intriguing rather than a truly disturbing play. In the absence of any strong sense of political forces other than the Nazis, the central important dilemma – the negotiation between individual conscience and social action – is diminished. The hero’s ideological capture is too easy: he is vacant from the beginning.
It was piquant that the opening night of The Band’s Visit was the day on which Daniel Barenboim announced that he is ceasing to conduct. Barenboim’s aim in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – that music should span the Israeli-Arab gulf – is the point of Michael Longhurst’s production. If anything the show (music and lyrics by David Yazbek and book by Itamar Moses, based on the screenplay by Eran Kolirin) suggests there is in essence no gulf at all.
The story is simple and sometimes expressed awkwardly, with bumbling humour in the opening moments. An Egyptian military band, stiff in powder-blue uniforms, rock up – due to a linguistic muddle – in a new town in the Negev desert area of Israel. “Welcome to nowhere,” says and sings Miri Mesika, the lustrous centre of the action, who is particularly welcoming to Alon Moni Aboutboul, the band’s conductor, a gruff and wistful widower. Here one man does nothing but wait for his girlfriend to call (the phone box adds a splash of red to Soutra Gilmour’s sober design); a young couple, tired out by new parenthood, squabble and love; a goofy youth is helped by a band member to roller-skate his way to the girl he has long fancied.
Klezmeric music weaves a skein of melancholy and complication around the wispy action. A clarinettist lullabies a squalling infant; marvellous feats of drummng summon a fervency lacking from the small town. Terrific Mesika chops a watermelon as if the fruit were a percussive instrument, and conjures memories of spellbound TV nights watching Omar Sharif. Yazbek’s lyrics, chronicles of everyday life as well as of romantic yearning – have a haunting edge. Most songwriters would be pleased to have come up with a line that defines the stage as well as a feeling: “Sodium light that masquerades as moon.”
You would have to be without a heart not to be stirred into some shock by The Boy With Two Hearts, first seen last year at the Wales Millennium Centre. An Afghan family – three adolescent boys and their parents – are forced to leave their home, under threat of death, when the woman of the house speaks out against the Taliban’s treatment of women. They head for the UK, in search of specialist medical attention for the eldest boy, who has a heart defect.
Their journey could almost be deduced in full from Tic Ashfield’s fairly hefty sound design: applause for the woman’s speech, a hammering at the door, the sound of a gun, the grinding of a lorry on a rough road, the clanking of a container, the mellow tones of a Radio 4 announcer, an ambulance siren, the beat of a heart. The feeling of inhabiting one life after another – “transplant” has more than one meaning here – is conjured in Hayley Grindle’s design: a thicket of empty jackets and shirts hang from the ceiling; they are in shades of blue and grey and mauve, the colours of skin starved of red blood.
In Phil Porter’s adaptation of the book by Hamed and Hessam Amiri, speech is sometimes superfluous: events are narrated direct to the audience (in the present tense) and partly acted out – as if in a series of tableaux – on a confined wooden box stage, with much running on the spot and slowed-down gestures. There are family ribbings – mostly about Man U and Arsenal and father’s bad jokes: “Why don’t we see Afghan women on screen? Because of the Tellyban.” Yet Amit Sharma’s production, threaded through with folk song, has, for all its terrors, an element of fable – and of a modest, truthful piece of theatre blinking in the semi-commercial glare.
Star ratings (out of five)
Good ★★★
The Band’s Visit ★★★★
The Boy With Two Hearts ★★★
