The good Doctor succumbs to evil
David Tennant stars in Good, making it one of the hottest tickets in town. But it’s no barrel of laughs. He plays a literature professor in Frankfurt. It’s 1933 and Hitler has come to power. Halder is a decent chap with a wife, children and a mum with dementia. He considers himself a ‘good’ man.
Slowly over the next two hours – and several years – he turns into a Nazi, his wife helping him put on his SS uniform for a day at the office.
The play asks how so many sane people could have been caught up in the madness, but doesn’t really provide an answer.
Part of me wanted Tennant – in Doctor Who mode – to defeat these Nazi Daleks. But here he seems such a weedy, blank canvas you wonder why the Third Reich ever felt he was worth promoting.
Halder does, shockingly, nothing to help his best friend, a Jewish psychiatrist with mas sive anxiety and a mordant wit, played beautifully by Elliot Levey. Tennant is at his best when weasily justifying his own moral corruption.
The set is a featureless concrete bunker that perhaps represents the interior of Halder’s head where much of the action takes place. And it doesn’t help that one actor (Sharon Small) has to play Halder’s wife, mistress and mother – rather confusing.
There’s lots of glorious music in this – Schubert especially – that lends a veneer of beauty to its ugly themes.
Written by C.P. Taylor and first seen in 1981, Good now strikes me as a useful warning about the craven nature of our academics who cave in to fashionable ideology, however daft or dangerous. I came away feeling the play is good but it’s just not that good.
Whatever happened to farce? Political correctness has helped consign this glorious theatre form to the bin of theatre history. Thank God for Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, as funny as it ever was, now getting a 40th anniversary production. It stars Felicity Kendal playing daffy Dotty Otley, the batty charlady part in an ill-fated tour of a sex comedy called Nothing On.
Phones don’t work, plates of sardines go flying, trousers are dropped, shoelaces are sabotaged. The cast is superbly drilled by veteran director Lindsay Posner. Alexander Hanson is a joy as the viciously sarcastic director. Joseph Millson is the tumbling, terrific young lead, Jonathan Coy effortless as the thick-as-mince older man, TracyAnn Oberman a gossipy trouper and Matthew Kelly is the dear, alcoholic old thespian.
The play’s precision construction remains a joy and the bellylaugh escapism and sweetness of the thing is happily intact. Act Two is especially killing.
Treat yourself.
TOUR DE FARCE: Felicity Kendal, Alexander Hanson and TracyAnn Oberman in Noises Off