Good review: David Tennant is hypnotic in muddled Nazi drama

Dominic Cooke’s revival of CP Taylor’s 1982 play, about a liberal professor who is lured by Nazism, is a mixed bag

David Tennant in ‘Good’ at the Harold Pinter Theatre (Johan Persson)

“We are good people,” says Anne, John Halder’s lover in Good. But can they be? The playwright Alan Plater described CP Taylor’s 1982 play as “the definitive piece about the Holocaust in the English language”. It tracks how Halder – a liberal and decent professor from Frankfurt – falls into arguing in favour of the Final Solution. In the lead role, David Tennant is stonily cold and compassionless in his sink from goodness, but Dominic Cooke’s confused production needs more clarity for it to fly.

For an easy existence, Halder joins the Nazis, despite not being “100 per cent sure” on Hitler. In conversations with his only and best friend, the Jewish doctor Maurice, he muses that the “anti-Jewish thing” can’t last; antisemitism isn’t practical as Germany needs the Jewish population. And with his “good” intentions to step back from the party if ever asked to do anything outside his moral conscience, the horrors of the regime are easy enough to look past.

Step by step, Halder’s grasp on right and wrong becomes steadily murkier. First, he is unbothered by the consequences as he abandons his wife, children and blind and sickly mother to pursue his lover Anne. Before long, he is reasoning that it is a positive move to destroy the texts of Jewish literary marvels as it will better education. Eventually, he starts to believe that running Jewish people violently out of their homes is, in fact, a protective warning for the Jews.