Good Theatre review: How a decent man transformed into a Nazi

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.