'Good' by CP Taylor
27 April 2023
CP Taylor was a Glasgow-born writer who wrote 80 plays in 16 prolific years - many of them for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and Live Theatre in Newcastle. Sadly, he died shortly after the premiere of his most successful play, 'Good' in 1981. On Saturday we were at the Curzon Cinema at Milton Keynes Gallery to see a screening of Dominic Cooke's current West End revival of 'Good', from the Harold Pinter Theatre in London. Set in Germany in the 1930s, 'Good' demonstrates how the incremental effect of a series of seemingly small decisions to go along with the prevailing political flow adds up to a journey from good to evil. Professor Halder, played here by David Tennant, appears naive, cowardly and blindly optimistic rather than evil - but his acquiescence with the Nazi regime acts as an allegory for Germany as a whole. His story is inventively told in a non-linear narrative which flits back and forward in Halder's life, often turning on a sixpence from past to present within the same scene. The rapid switching between different places, times and characters is brilliantly done here by a cast of three actors - with Sharon Small and Elliot Levey each playing multiple parts. It's a very clever script with echoes of Tom Stoppard, and a very dark play which looks at good and evil as things we choose to do rather than inherent traits we cannot help - "subjective thinking masquerading as objective truth".
posted by Robin Simpson @ 11:50 am
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