David Tennant as John Halder
in Good at the Harold Pinter Theatre
London 2022.
Photo by Johan Persson
056 – Good, by C.P. Taylor
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John Halder is a professor of literature at Frankfurt University. He is a cultured and caring man, who is married with two children, and who looks after his mother who suffers from dementia. He lives in dramatic times, because this is 1933, and Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists have come to power in Germany. The professor finds himself drawn into joining the Nazi elite as they pursue their terrible political and cultural agenda. His story is played out in C.P. Taylor’s disturbing, cautionary play, Good, which charts how an ostensibly ‘good’ person can become not just complicit to evil behaviour, but an active participant. The way in which an ordinary individual is caught up in a populist crusade speaks strongly to the dangers of our own time, where pernicious views and misinformation are so easily disseminated.
Good was first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Donmar Warehouse in September 1981. As we record this episode a new production of Good is currently running at the Harold Pinter theatre in London’s West End, directed by Dominic Cooke and starring David Tennant as John Halder. I’m hugely honoured to have the opportunity to talk with director Dominic Cooke about this original and powerful play, and his new production.
Dominic Cooke
Dominic Cooke is an acclaimed director of stage and acreen. He was the Artistic Director of the Royal Court theatre from 2006 to 2013, where he presided over a exhilaratingly creative period which included premieres of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Lucy Prebble’s Enron, and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park to name just a few favourites.
He is an Associate Director of the National Theatre, where his acclaimed productions have included Caryl Churchill’s Here We Go, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in 2017, which was nominated for no fewer than 10 Olivier awards, and more recently Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green.
Dominic is also a writer and director for TV and film, having adapted and directed the BBC series of Shakespeare’s The Hollow Crown – The Wars of the Roses, as well as directed the films On Chesil Beach and The Courier, and he is next due to direct a film version of Follies.
Recommended Play
Dominic recommended The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare.
The Footnotes to our episode on C.P.Taylor’s Good include observations on Halder’s solipsism, his shameful betrayal of his friend Maurice, and how individual moral paralysis writ large can sanction a political crusade.
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063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.
062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward
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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.
I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.
I watch the play with my daughter, got to say it’s certainly though provoking. The cast were absolutely brilliant never left the stage but took on different caractors with out cloths changes but you instantly knew what character they were playing , David Tennant was spellbinding, he should have got a Olivier award he was outstanding.