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.
