Review Roundup: GOOD, starring David Tennant

It is third time lucky for Dominic Cooke's revival of C.P Taylor's GOOD, having been delayed twice by the pandemic. The first production from Cooke and Kate Horton's company, Fictionhouse, it stars David Tennant, Sharon Small and Elliot Levey.

So what did the critics think?

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Aliya Al-Hassan: BroadwayWorld: Taylor's play is, of course, an exposition of the horror of the Holocaust, but it is also a quietly visceral and complex examination of the deconstruction of a man's morality and values. Halder is indifferent and distant and fails to challenge what is happening: this is a stark warning against sleepwalking into a populist rhetoric.

Arifa Akbar: The Guardian: What Taylor shows, and Tennant conveys so unnervingly, is that a lack of principle and ideological zeal can in fact create the zealot. "I don't believe in evil," his lover tells him, but for Halder the bigger problem is belief itself. His slide into inhumanity comes about because of his not caring for others enough and not believing in anything enough.

Sarah Hemming: The Financial Times: 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.

Dominic Maxwell: The Times: He is an unusually realistic fictional character - pleasant yet all too prone to the sort of moral equivocation you don't often get in protagonists. Tennant gives Halder's sense of detachment equal sway to his sense of decency. It's terrible, Halder admits, but putting on uniform is a thrill. He shouldn't be pleased, he knows, but it's nice that Hitler likes his book on euthanasia.

Sarah Crompton: WhatsOnStage: It is hard for Small to switch between Halder's mother, his depressed wife Helen and the sprightly student Anne, for whom he leaves Helen and his children. She discovers poignancy, particularly as Helen, and also adeptly turns her hand to playing a variety of high-ranking SS officials, but the constant switching of voice in an already fragmented text flattens the trajectory of Halder's descent.

GOOD is running at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 24 December

Photo Credit: Johan Perrson

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