“Good” (28th October 2011) Location: Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, UK

Once again I won some tickets for a show (when will I win the Euromillions?? I wish…).

This time I won some tickets to see a concert from Dagmar Krause, but due to illness it was cancelled. As compensation, I was offered tickets to see C P Taylor’s 1981 play “Good” staged on the Royal Exchange Theatre by Polly Findlay.

“Good” tries to explain how a harmless German academic finds himself reluctantly caught up in Hitler’s rise to power, and how he unsuspectingly becomes an instrument in the atrocities at Auschwitz.

John Halder (Adrian Rawlins) is a devoted family man who teaches German literature, hates the Nazis and whose best friend is a Jewish doctor.  In 1933 he can’t believe that the new National Socialist government will be able to implement its outrageous policies.  Meanwhile his home life is disrupted by his needy, neurotic wife and a blind mother with dementia; and at work he’s distracted by an attractive blonde student who can’t see the relevance of Goethe’s Faust.

John tries to be good but is torn between conflicting interests, not least his own desire for an easier life.  He tries to comfort his Jewish friend Maurice although he won’t help him; he loves his musical wife but abandons her for the charms of the pretty blonde; he wants to help his disabled mother but hasn’t the patience to care for her properly.

John’s sense of chaos is mimicked by overlapping scenes, by his confidential asides to the audience, and by frequent interruptions from a troupe of invisible singers and musicians.  Jazz standards, operatic arias and religious cantatas pop out at him from drawers, handbags and coffee pots wherever he goes.

Adrian Rawlins’ Professor Halder is a typical unkempt intellectual, weak but well-meaning – however his selfishness and vanity allow him to be seduced firstly by the lovely young Anne (Beth Park) and later by the Nazis and their smart SS uniform.

 The entire play revolves around John but he risks being overshadowed whenever Kerry Shale’s charismatic, caustic and comical Maurice takes to the stage.  In fact the entire cast excels, with most of them playing several characters as well as a variety of musical instruments. 

Polly Findlay's production for the Royal Exchange gets across the chaotic, dreamlike structure of the piece, bringing out both the humour and the darkness in the play. It is about asking whether good people can be persuaded to do very bad things. It turns to those of us who condemn what the Nazis did and asks whether we can truly say that our actions would have been radically different from the thousands of people who were as "good" as we believe ourselves to be or whether we would have had the courage to swim against the prevailing tide.

On the surface, this is a very dark comedy, but concealed beneath is something rather more complex that questions how we view ourselves and others as human beings. This play quite easily makes us think and leads us to an uncertain limbo where moral choices could conflict with our instincts for survival.

For a complex play it turns out the answers are quite simple: be nice to other people, and Nazis really are nasty. This staging of “Good” is a very talented production of an absorbing modern classic.