GOOD Theatre Reviews starring David Tennant

“Tennant’s nice then Nazi in this insidious revival”

“In this hugely rewarding revival of CP Taylor’s 1981 play about Nazi Germany, he [David Tennant] plays an academic, John Halder, who doesn’t mean to become a Nazi. He doesn’t want to become a Nazi. Heavens, his best friend is a Jewish psychiatrist. So how does he end up as an SS officer, spouting antisemitic dogma as he heads towards a death camp?

“And how, without histrionics, does Dominic Cooke’s quiet revival end up scooping out your innards? It doesn’t do it hastily. For the first half, you may find yourself admiring the clarity of writing without falling entirely prey to it.”

“Don’t expect fireworks. What you get is something stranger, more insidious, and I suspect much more memorable.”

“David Tennant grips in 1930s-set ethical drama Good”

“‘We probably are good,’ says David Tennant’s Halder, meditatively, towards the end of CP Taylor’s Good.That’s something we all want to believe of ourselves, but never want tested by circumstance. Up step three brilliant pieces of drama to test it for us: to probe and unsettle our consciences and to pitch individual morality against social responsibility. This is drama as ethical and emotional workout: bracing, riveting, galvanising.”

“Tennant is riveting: witty and intensely human but also brilliantly precise, shifting between private and public self, affability and irritation, all the while evolving from reasoned detachment towards chilling self-preservation. His physicality is superb — as angular and taut as a coat hanger — his body suggesting what his mind refuses to admit. Around him, Elliot Levey and Sharon Small, both excellent, play everyone else, bringing shape to characters who are coloured by Halder’s memories of them.”

“David Tennant is chillingly plausible”

“This stark play is an important rather than an enjoyable watch”

“David Tennant is chillingly plausible as John Halder, the ‘good’ German who gradually accommodates himself to Nazism in this stark and hard-hitting revival of the late CP Taylor’s 1982 drama. Dominic Cooke’s stripped-back, almost abstract production implicates us all in a remorseless journey towards dehumanisation. It’s become more rather than less pertinent after a two-year Covid delay to its planned 2020 premiere.”

“Vicki Mortimer’s set is an angled, strip-lit concrete cell with two hatches. One delivers a deluge of books onto the stage, the other frames a furnace. The sound design covers not only the music Halder hears – brass bands, jazz, Schubert, Mendelsohn – but the pages he turns and the orders he reads, distilling the action down even further. Mostly the actors just sit or stand.

GOOD is playing an 11 week season at the Harold Pinter until 24 December 2022. GOOD tickets on sale now.