Good
Harold Pinter Theatre | ★★★★★

As sometimes happens when theatre addresses the Holocaust, the JC critic can end up reviewing the audience as well as the show.

And so it was that, at the end of this predictably excellent revival of CP Taylor’s play, what happened off-stage will stick with me for as long as what happened on.

But first the excellence, which was predictable because the cast includes the immensely watchable David Tennant, an actor whose innate likeability provides a key insight into how his character John Halder morphs from a book-loving academic in 1930s Frankfurt to a book-burning SS officer.

David Tennant and Sharon Small in GOOD at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Directed by Dominic Cooke, Photographer Johan Persson 2

David Tennant and Sharon Small

Halder personifies the question at the heart of Taylor’s 1982 play: how does a perfectly decent human being become a perpetrator of atrocity?

By accident I received a slight preview of Tennant’s transition in this role. While the show was in rehearsals I was waiting in a nearby room to interview one of the other reasons this production is predictably excellent: Elliot Levey, who plays Halder’s best friend Maurice, a Jewish psychiatrist.

The room was being used by the show’s wardrobe department for a fitting session with the cast, which also includes Sharon Small as Halder’s wife Helen. (Cooke has turned CP Taylor’s play into a three-hander.)

Into the room breezed Tennant to try on a long leather trench coat, that bit of Nazi garb that is perhaps the most identifiable part of an SS uniform. Then Levey arrived and he and I left before Tennant donned the coat.

But I couldn’t stop wondering how the garment must have felt to him when he put it on; how it changed the expression on this delightful actor’s face as he looked back at himself in the mirror, and what it made him feel.

David Tennant in GOOD at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Directed by Dominic Cooke, Photographer Johan Persson 2

David Tennant as academic Halder

In the play there is a scene that is something like that fitting session. It takes place in the second act and is set on the morning before Kristallnacht. Tennant’s Halder is chatting amiably to his wife Helen (Small) in their bedroom as he gets dressed.

Just as any other couple might, they discuss that day’s plans. There is an air of anticipation, as if this is his first day in a new job. By the time the process is complete, Halder, the once bookish intellectual who confides his most intimate fears and thoughts to his Jewish best friend, is now every inch a Nazi.

The scene tidily sums up Taylor’s objective. The Glasgow-born playwright died just before his work premiered in 1982 and so never knew it would become an international hit.

He was haunted by the idea of what would have become of him and his family if the Germans had successfully invaded Britain.

Perhaps he also wondered who among his non-Jewish friends might have betrayed him. Taylor explores to devastating effect how a good man becomes pitiless.

Like a dream play, the action, which takes place mostly in 1930s Frankfurt, all happens in Halder’s mind, which in Vicki Mortimer’s design is visualised as a concrete bunker. Or perhaps it is a gas chamber?

Flanked by Levey and Small, who play multiple roles as well as the key figures of Halder’s friend and wife, scenes are conjured by Halder’s conscience as if it is doing battle with his intellect.

It has a fevered need to understand how a man with the power to save his dearest friend chooses instead to join the gang that wants to kill him.

Hotfoot from his Olivier-winning performance as another doomed German Jew, Herr Schultz in the current smash hit revival of Cabaret, Levey superbly conveys the other transformation in the play.

Where Tennant charts Halder’s disdain for, then his embrace of, Nazi barbarity, Levey conveys the confidence with which Maurice lives his life in German society and then his panicky realisation that almost everyone in it wishes him dead.

I worry slightly that it is a performance for which Levey may need time to recover. As the only Jew on stage he is, after all, the only one with skin in the game.

As well as playing Maurice, the production also demands that he segues to such a real- life Nazi as Philipp Bouhler, who in the play gives Halder the job of overseeing the murder of disabled people in concentration camps.

“I’ve never even heard of Auschwitz,” says Helen breezily as she hands her husband his trousers.

Taylor’s play is brilliant for many reasons. But among the less recognised is the measured way in which he writes Nazis. There are no monsters frothing at the mouth here, just people putting policy into effect.

And so to the audience’s tin-eared contribution to the evening. The production ends with a startling reveal.

A design coup, it explains the music that haunts Halder throughout. But as the Holocaust always does when effectively represented, it renders you desolate and without the capacity to appreciate art.

No doubt this was intentional. The congratulatory applause felt terribly out of place. What is needed at the end of this play is silence, at least until the curtain call.