There is an instructive early scene in CP Taylor’s play about Germany’s slide into nazism when we hear of the friendship between Beethoven and Goethe, which ended when the composer, living in penury, wrote a begging letter to Goethe, who never responded. Professor Halder (David Tennant), a German academic, recounts this betrayal to his Jewish best friend, Maurice (Elliot Levey), in outraged tones, yet it is he who betrays his friend in the most heinous of ways.
Often considered an examination of how a “good” man is corrupted, the play begins in 1933 and follows Halder’s conversion to nazism, step by step. The most striking thing, first of all, is its size: Vicki Mortimer’s set is confined to a walled-in section of the stage and shorn of all the pomp and symbolism of the Third Reich. It is bare, grey and prison-like. There are only three actors (plus a fourth who emerges in the closing moments) and they are quietly magnificent.
Good is an inherently discursive play which hangs on its final reveal and director Dominic Cooke ekes out the drama until it blooms into compelling psychological theatre with the feel of a fever dream. Halder’s inner thoughts are spoken out loud, and jumbled up with the dialogue. Levey and Sharon Small play the other parts, from Halder’s senile mother to his anxious wife and his lover. The women seem deliberately shrill or one-dimensional.
Scenes change abruptly: one minute Halder is having dinner with Maurice in Frankfurt, the next Levey is playing a Nazi enlisting Halder into the party in Hamburg. Music accompanies Halder all the way, from the banned sounds of jazz to swing, Schubert, Chopin, Wagner and more, giving an added layer of discombobulation: heady and hallucinogenic.
The strangeness of this staging – its scale and non-sequiturs – is explained at the end, but the payoff isn’t quite surprising enough. Never mind because there is enough intrigue, intellect and fine acting to keep us rapt. Tennant is spellbinding in his ordinariness, not hiding Halder’s venality yet ensuring he remains human. Levey plays the lovable Maurice first with desperation, when he is begging his friend for help, then with terrible, tragic silences.
What makes this study fascinating, and appalling, is that Halder is not simply following orders: he is an active participant who joins the party because they select and flatter him. But he is not a Nazi who buys into antisemitic ideology: “the anti-Jewish rubbish”, he calls it, and like Hannah Arendt he sees it as an outrage to common sense. Yet still he joins the SS.
What Taylor shows, and Tennant conveys so unnervingly, is that a lack of principle and ideological zeal can in fact create the zealot. “I don’t believe in evil,” his lover tells him, but for Halder the bigger problem is belief itself. His slide into inhumanity comes about because of his not caring for others enough and not believing in anything enough.
Good is a gradually enraging drama that makes us hear afresh the denials that lead populism into dangerous waters, and may well be a lesson for our times. It invites reflection on how an individual can stand up to despotism in the contemporary world too – in Iran or Russia, and at what cost. And it makes us assess the meanings of words such as “courage” and “cowardice”.
The good of the title, is not, as we assume, referring to a good man turned bad, but a man who turns bad because he serves his own good above all else. “If I am not for myself, then who is for me?” he says, perversely quoting a line from the Talmud. It is this that fuels the creep towards dead-eyed evil.
At the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 24 December.
