Gently Insidious Slope to Hell

By T.E. Kalem

GOOD by C.P. Taylor

"History is a nightmare from which 1 am trying to awake."

--Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses

History is a nightmare into which the antihero of Good sleepwalks. John Haider (Alan Howard) is a decent enough human being. He is kind to his wife Helen (Meg Wynn-Owen), though she is an execrably sloppy homemaker. Even if he has to cook the meal, he sees to it that his three children are properly fed. With his mother (Marjorie Yates), who is blind, senile and bitter, Haider is agonizingly solicitous.

The time is 1933; the place Frankfurt, Germany. By vocation, Haider is a professor of German classics who also writes novels. He is the sort of man who is appalled by the fact that Goethe refused to send Beethoven money when the composer was in desperate need. Haider's best friend, Maurice (Gary Waldhorn), is a Jewish psychoanalyst. Yet in the course of this drama, Haider erases his conscience like chalk on a lecture-room blackboard. At Good's end, this decent, liberal-minded scholar has become Eichmann's right-hand man at Auschwitz.

How did it happen?

Paradoxically, the late British playwright C.R Taylor does not, initially, seem to be the best possible man to ask. He poses the question engrossingly, but most of the answers he provides seem either tantalizingly elusive or logically implausible. Haider is a congenital daydreamer. Not only the taste of reality but the feel of it eludes him. This fact is incorporated in the structure of the play by the presence onstage of a six-man band. The musicians punctuate Haider's crises, conflicts and decisive indecision with marching songs, waltzes, jazz tunes and snatches of opera. These are the intravenous tranquilizers with which Haider suppresses the torment of truth. Good is a trip through the inner space of a troubled mind; just as others hear voices, Haider hears ironic and beguiling music.

Passive by nature, Haider is also highly suggestible. His father-in-law suggests that he join the Nazi Party, so he does. An old World War I buddy (Pip Miller) suggests that he join the SS elite corps, so he does. The uniform thrills him, as does a written plaudit from the Fuehrer on his pro-euthanasia novel: "The surge of pride in me! Reading that scrawled sentence in Adolfs shaky hand--It said: 'Written from the heart!' "

The bands play on, and Haider marches in lockstep. Only as he is greeted by the strains of Schubert's March Militaire from the camp's orchestra at the gates of Auschwitz does he realize that he has supped full of horrors. This time, and he shrieks it out, "The band was Real! The band was Real!" With this shattering climax, Good achieves a high pitch of luminous moral gravity. Venturing beyond easy and merely plausible answers about how a good man succumbs to evil forces, Playwright Taylor has etched the profile of an insidiously disarming process. That process was perhaps best described by Britain's belletrist of metaphysics, C.S. Lewis: "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

As an export of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Good is a yardstick of theatrical quality. This company does not poach on Shakespeare's name; it exalts it. R.S.C. is a trade label for national pride and dramatic prowess. This production exhibits the taut directorial discipline of Howard Davies and is studded with the kind of acting skill and finesse that other troupes pray for. While the entire cast is worth a citation, special grace notes are struck by Waldhorn's Maurice, a self-mocking Jew who is attractive even in his visceral fears; by David Howey as a sinister Silly Billy of a Hitler; and by Felicity Dean as Haider's adorably winning mistress.

As for Alan Howard, count him on the one hand on which are numbered the finest actors of the English-speaking theater. He consumes the stage with his talents. Part pedant and part imp, he blinks like an owl exposed to unwelcome light and assumes the postures of a corkscrew Chaplin. Haider's weakest hours are Howard's finest as he links what is wretched in the character with the common bond of man's unalterable condition. --By T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.