Elliot Levey is going from playing one German Jew — Herr Schultz in Cabaret — to playing another German Jew, Maurice Gluckstein in Good, CP Taylor’s 1981 play that demonstrates how perfectly decent people became willing perpetrators of atrocity.
Jewish, Glasgow-born playwright Taylor charts this process through a fictional friendship between literary academic John Halder (played in Dominic Cooke’s Covid-delayed production by David Tennant) and his best friend Maurice, a Jewish psychiatrist (Levey). Poignantly, although the play was Taylor’s greatest work, he never saw it because he died of pneumonia just before it opened.
Levey was on board for the show in 2019. But then the pandemic put the brakes on Good and during the pause up came another show set mainly in pre-war Germany as the country succumbed to and then embraced Nazism. And that show also featured a doomed German Jew as a key character.
“When Cabaret came along I thought I’d just pop off and do a little bit of prep for Maurice,” says Levey. “But then that turned into a big old thing.”
Elliot Levey in rehearsal for GOOD Photo Johan Persson 01832
Elliot Levey in rehearsal for Good
Yes, Cabaret did turn into a big old thing. Rebecca Frecknall’s acclaimed revival starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley is still playing in the West End, with a different cast, and bagged seven Olivier awards, one of which was Levey’s for Best Supporting Actor. Very nice.
Yet the title of the award fails to convey a performance that was more than supporting. It was the humane heart of the production.
“It took me by surprise how wonderful it was to receive the Olivier,” says Levey. “I’ve spent my life sort of going ‘Who needs silly old baubles?’ And then suddenly…! And having also spent a lifetime watching awards where the camera is on the nominees who are all doing their best to look very relaxed before the winner is announced, I then looked back at the footage of mine and I’m practically praying.”
If there was an award for acceptance speeches Levey would win that too. It is worth looking up on YouTube. Still bearing his character’s bushy Einstein-esque moustache, he Dad-dances to the stage (he and his wife, the documentary-maker Emma Loach, daughter of Ken, have three children) and then talks movingly about his Ukrainian grandfather Elia Zivatovsky, who was given sanctuary by the British.
Once here Elia changed his name to Alec Levey to hide his Jewishness. “Cunning!” said Levey, getting a big laugh. He then appealed for today’s migrants to be treated with the same compassion to thunderous applause from the starry audience.
Sharon Small and David Tennant in rehearsal for GOOD Photo Johan Persson 02063
Sharon Small and David Tennant in rehearsal for Good
It all seems a long way off from the ambivalence Levey once felt about being typecast as an actor who plays Jews. In fact, there are more non-Jews on his CV, such as Bishop Cauchon in Saint Joan at the Donmar Warehouse, Robespierre in Danton’s Death at the National Theatre and Lord Burleigh in Mary Stuart in the West End. But even here he suspects casting directors often saw in his Jewishness a something-of-the-night quality that goes with dark untrustworthiness.
However, things have changed for Levey when it comes to playing Jews. He feels no ambivalence’ at all about playing the title role in an upcoming revival of Patrick Marber’s Jewish play Howard Katz, which will be Levey’s third Jew on the trot.
“Identity politics have transformed acting,” he says. “Suddenly we’re in a whole new world where we are interested in authenticity. It is right and proper, I would say, that Jews play Jews. My golden rule always is, if the minority being portrayed buy it, the job’s a good ’un.”
His current Jew, Maurice in Good, may be the most demanding.
Director Dominic Cooke (formerly of the Royal Court, where he directed the notorious Seven Jewish Children) has turned the play into a three-hander (with Sharon Small playing the wife of Tennant’s Halder). Normally there are 13 actors plus musicians in a production of Good.
This one sees Small and Levey play multiple roles. Their characters are conjured by the mind of Halder as he involuntarily recalls his journey from being a sensitive academic with a love of literature whose best friend is Jewish, to a participator in Kristallnacht and then at Adolf Eichmann’s behest, getting a job at Auschwitz, dealing — chillingly — with overcrowding.
All this means that Levey has to play the roles of Nazis — Eichmann and the high-ranking Philipp Bouhler — as well as the play’s Jew.
In the room where the cast are being fitted for costumes, there is an SS Nazi leather trenchcoat waiting for one of the men to try on. For Levey, art about the Holocaust is only worth doing if the piece is worthy.
“To address the attempted destruction of European Jewry in any way which diminishes it is the closest thing I can imagine of to a sin,” he says.
“I don’t believe in God but there’s something sinful about it. If you’re doing a play on this subject, or you’re writing a book about it, my God it’s got to be better than good.”
For preparation the cast have been watching Claude Lanzmann’s testimonial epic Shoah. It is, says Levey a way of “cleansing the palate” of all the unpalatable Holocaust works of art that have become a cottage industry. Does he have any in mind? There are many, he says. And then he comes up with one.
“I’m talking about that horrible one with a kid, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I mean, to me I want to haul that guy over the coals because it’s lazy, bad literature and it’s an appalling film. I’m not interested in a writer looking at a blank page or a blank screen and going ‘What about this as a subject?’”
CP Taylor, by contrast, was writing from a very different perspective. In the foreword to his play he wrote, “I grew up during the war under a deeply felt anxiety that the Germans might win, overrun Britain and that I, and my mother and father would end up, like my less fortunate co-religionists in a Nazi death camp — perhaps specially built in Scotland or England.”
“It’s really intense stuff,” says Levey of the play.
“We don’t know enough about Taylor because he died at 52. He was a Glaswegian working-class Jew and was really prolific. But this was his big hit. And my God it’s good.”
Good opens this week and is at
the Harold Pinter Theatre until December 24
goodtheplay.com
