National Theatre Live: Good (2023) User Reviews

Ever wondered how normal people became Nazis?

[1930s_Time_Machine · 8/10 · 5 February 2024]

This is a stage play, not a film so having just three actors playing several different characters is a bit confusing to us 'movie people' - but only for the first few minutes. You soon get used to it and then you'll be totally engrossed by this fascinating, enjoyable (yes, enjoyable) piece of entertainment.

The title 'GOOD' refers to the fact that David Tennant's character is.... or was..... or is a good person.... the person whom we watch become a Nazi. CP Taylor's play shows the often tiny, inconsequential changes which drip feed into Dr Hadler's normal life. These are sometimes trivial, sometimes surprising, sometimes they're dismissed because they simply can't be correct, sometimes accepted because 'they' must know what they're doing.

This feels very personal, it's not a cold historical drama. It doesn't explain why the things happen, it doesn't suggest it was the devastating disappointment of the Weimar Republic - no, it's not a history lesson of the 1930s, it just shows that things like this can happen and seem normal.

As stage plays go, this is pretty brilliant an casting David Tennant in this role was an act of genius - everyone likes David Tennant and watching him evolve from nice David to Nazi David is both horrific because it's so believable .

Terrific investigation of how a good man does evil

[geofftaylor-20727 · 9/10 · 23 April 2023]

Sadly unknown to me until this viewing, "Good" is a famous play by British playwright C. P. Taylor set in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, investigating the incidence of evil in one of the most highly cultured societies in the world. The play is about a German literary academic, John Halder, whose best friend is a Jew, that charts his move into active racist Nazism. Very interesting production, taking the audience in and out of the main character's head, his inner psychology, via the dramatic device of externalising his inner ongoing mental dialogue. Terrific lead performance by Tenant, excellent support from the other two main actors, Sharon Small and Eliot Levey. In the final count, emotionally, honest and very affecting. Other plot strands are the issue of Halder's mother's descent into dementia, which he investigates fictionally in a novel, and his shift from one wife, who has psychological issues, to a love affair with an adoring and uncritical young female student who he then marries.

The dramatic arc requires a smooth transition from someone just like us, albeit perhaps the best of us, a cultured inclusive liberal, to a committed antisemitic fascist. The play shows this transition pretty well, with perhaps a few skips or jumps, but despite the use of vocalised interior monologue / dialogue, I did not feel it was quite smooth enough. (Better though than the coin-flip transition of do-gooder Dr Otto Octavius to evil Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2, one of my all-time favourite films, I should add.) However, there is good use of transition assists (assisting devices), such as the recruitment to consult on justifiable termination of medical subjects, based on his discussion of last-resort euthanasia in his novel, that later will blur into termination of categories of people deemed damaging to the advancement of German society. In summary, the play excellently depicts the progression of a person into Nazism, but does not quite convincingly communicate the internal psychological changes required.

The question the play asks is how ordinary people can be brought into the process of implementing evil policies. The play "Good" investigates the question in the context of the individual, from a bourgeois perspective. A Marxist perspective might involve the principle of alienation from a mass murdering or genocidal project by breaking the project up into components that in themselves are not (overtly) inherently evil. Organising mass murder into an industrial process, like an assembly line, dilutes and dissipates guilt for evil actions, and divorces individuals' actions from the horror of the overall project. It is Marx's alienation of the worker from their work by the structural nature of the manufacturing process, applied to mass murder. Likewise, the industrialisation of WWI is evident near the beginning of the latest film adaptation of "All Quiet on the Western Front", when a new army recruit finds the supposedly new uniform he has been issued with, due to a failure in the recycling process, still bears the name tags of the dead soldier who had previously worn it. The ability of workers to disrupt such industrial processes can be seen, for example, in the 2018 film "Nae Pasaran", which gives the case of the Scottish Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride who blocked shipment of fighter plane engines needed to continue to bomb people protesting Chilean dictator Pinochet's military coup.