Tennant plays a man drawn into working with the Nazis, despite himself (Picture: Johan Persson)
David Tennant’s many star qualities include an intelligence that never feels remote, a wit that is rarely spiteful, and sheer likeability in spades.
All these qualities, and particularly the last, are deployed to devastating effect by director Dominic Cooke in this revival of CP Taylor’s play – a cooly told warning about how perfectly decent people like you and me can become perpetrators of atrocity.
Set mostly in 1930s Germany during the rise of the Nazis, Tennant is literary academic John Halder whose best – indeed only – friend is Maurice (Elliot Levey), a Jewish psychiatrist. Both men are professionally successful, though Halder’s private life is complicated by a psychologically fragile wife and infirm elderly mother (both played by Inspector Lynley star Sharon Small).
Still, the good news is the Nazis are flattering Halder into joining their cause, which he does, he tells himself, in the hope he can be a civilising influence.
Cooke has stripped back Taylor’s original 1982 play into what is basically a three-hander. And instead of the action taking place in Frankfurt, everything here happens in Halder’s head, which in Vicki Mortimer’s design is visualised as a concrete bunker. Or perhaps it is a gas chamber.
Director Dominic Cooke is in full control of his material (Picture: Johan Persson)
Tennant serves to portray a moral transformation (Picture: Johan Persson)
The result is a kind of dream play in which Halder is haunted by memories and the music that was playing when the events were first experienced. The conjured scenes from his life chart his change from sensitive, anti-Hitler book lover to book burner and SS officer.
Crucially Tennant’s detailed performance never loses its humanity or its humour, which is really Taylor’s point. There are no monsters, just people making monstrous choices and doing monstrous things.
However, of this production’s excellent three stars it is Levey who has the toughest gig. His Maurice also has a transition: from the suave confidence of a man who feels utterly at home in the beloved country of his birth to that of panicked prey who realises almost every inch of it wishes him dead.
Add to this the fact that Levey’s previous stage role was the equally doomed German Jew Herr Schultz in the current massive hit revival of Cabaret for which the actor, who is himself Jewish, won an Olivier, and it possible to imagine that the tears that fill Maurice’s eyes at the point his fate is inescapable do not only belong to Levey’s character but the actor too.
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Tennant plays a man drawn into working with the Nazis, despite himself.