David Tennant grips in 1930s-set ethical drama Good — theatre review

Good

Harold Pinter Theatre, London

“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.

Each play is pinned to the stage by a scintillating central performance as a character goes through the mill. In The Doctor, Juliet Stevenson’s well-meaning physician is trapped in a web of medical ethics and identity politics; in Iphigenia in Splott, Sophie Melville’s Effie confronts us with the true costs of austerity. And in Good, Tennant plays an academic sucked into horror in 1930s Germany.

Taylor’s 1981 play is quietly terrifying. Over the course of two hours, he charts how an intelligent, sensitive, decent professor, whose best friend is Jewish, slips, by degrees, into arguing for the Final Solution. Shrewdly, Taylor shows us all this not in real time, but through memory, as Halder wrestles with his conscience and relives key moments.

The splintered structure can make it challenging to follow, but it works by accumulation, plunging us into the process with him, rather than letting us judge safely from outside. It’s an astute analysis of the incremental psychological steps towards accepting the unacceptable.

The arguments are frighteningly familiar, as Halder tries to reassure himself that he’s doing the right thing. Inertia is seductive; reason a flawed tool. We watch him slide into accepting increasing extremism as the norm. We see how his personal flaws — professional vanity, impatience with his messy wife and his ailing mother, a certain emotional detachment — lay him open to manipulation. In ordinary times, these might remain just his own flaws but, levered open by flattery, they lead him down the path to monstrosities.

We also see, in Dominic Cooke’s deftly modulated production, flashes of evidence — in his Jewish friend Maurice’s horrified expression, in the glimpses of flames, in the band music that haunts Halder — that deep in his conscience is the truth. Meanwhile, Vicki Mortimer’s clinical set with its wall benches and hatch-windows poses the question: where exactly are we? In a government building? A medical institution? A prison cell? Somewhere worse? Zoe Spurr’s clever lighting keeps changing the atmosphere, drawing links between the answers.

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.

It’s a demanding play. It’s also terribly sad and a salutary warning about complacency and seeing only what you want to see.

★★★★★

To December 24, goodtheplay.com

The Doctor

Duke of York’s, London

Easy answers come under scrutiny again in Robert Icke’s The Doctor. The pandemic delayed its transfer to the West End from the Almeida but, if anything, the intervening years, and the raging arguments about lockdowns and vaccination, have only sharpened its relevance. Icke remodels Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 drama into a play for today, focusing on a female Jewish physician, Ruth Wolff, whose decision to refuse a Catholic priest access to a dying teenager rapidly becomes a political football.

Here, Ruth’s action pitches her into the toxic world of culture wars and instant online judgment. Soon, the future of the clinic that Ruth built from scratch is under threat, together with its pioneering work on dementia. Should she apologise and make the whole thing go away? Is it integrity or obstinacy that makes her refuse?

While public opinion rages, the play shows us the reasoning behind Ruth’s decision. As a doctor, she argues, she had to protect her patient’s state of mind: allowing the priest in would have alerted the girl to the gravity of her condition and could have killed her.

Ruth is genuine, but is she right? Her assertion that her decisions are purely clinical are gradually undermined by what we learn of her personal life: the play allows us to understand her motives perhaps better than she does herself.

Icke’s drama plays out like a thriller, balancing principle against pragmatism and faith against reason, spinning a cat’s cradle of personal ambitions and agendas. He and director Anthony Almeida cleverly extend that to the audience with casting choices that pull the rug from under us, making us re-evaluate our assumptions. And, while the production starts over-emphatically, it is soon gripping, with the skilful cast shifting our sympathies and Hildegard Bechtler’s revolving set literally changing our perspective.

Stevenson enriches this complexity. Her Ruth is fiercely intelligent and mercilessly unsentimental: she has an unwavering integrity and refuses to pity herself. She can also be brittle, patronising and blinkered. But what is superb about Stevenson is the way she wrongfoots you emotionally at the end, again leaving you to rethink what you thought you knew.

★★★★★

To December 11, thedoctorwestend.co.uk

Iphigenia in Splott

Lyric Hammersmith, London

“You all know me,” says Sophie Melville’s Effie in Iphigenia in Splott, fixing the audience with a defiant, provocative stare. “I strut down the street and your eyes dive for the ground.”

And it’s probably true. Effie, drunk, loud, foul-mouthed, swaggering, is exactly the sort of person most of us would swerve around. But she’s about to make us look and look hard — and what we’ll see is a stark, searing indictment of an unequal society.

Gary Owen’s tremendous monologue was written as a response to prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne’s austerity policies: Splott, in Cardiff, south Wales, was the sort of deprived area that bore the brunt of cuts and closures. This revival arrives amid a political storm about possible cuts in public spending by Liz Truss’s government. That the play has only gained in resonance is shocking, and Melville’s outstanding performance blazes with ferocious despair.

Key to the play’s power is that, like Stevenson’s Ruth, Melville’s Effie initially pushes us away. Spiky and scornful, she defies pity, revelling in grisly details as she treats us to an account of her chaotic lifestyle: one-night stands, drinking binges, three-day hangovers. But gradually her scattered narrative takes shape, focusing itself around the great, heartbreaking tragedy that has sliced through Effie’s life: a moment of hope snatched away by lack of resources in her local hospital. Her story, we realise, is her way of claiming back what has been ripped from her.

On a set of neon lights and broken blinds, Rachel O’Riordan’s staging pulses with rage and sorrow while Melville prowls the space like a caged cheetah: sensuous, proud, vividly alive then shockingly still. “It seems, it’s always places like this, and people like us who have to take it, when the time for cutting comes,” she says. “What is gonna happen when we can’t take it any more?”

Three wonderful performances; three gripping plays, each asking searching questions about moral responsibility.

★★★★☆

To October 22, lyric.co.uk