Good (by Cecil Philip Taylor)

Check out our 4* review from the South Wales Echo right here! You can now download the flyer here!

Cast

Halder | Andreas Constantinou
Crooner | Gordon Scott
Nurse | Sarah Madden
Mother | Trish Murphy
Clerk | George Nichols
Maurice | Brian Smith
Helen | Amanda Mulford
Bouller/Tauber | Ricky Valentine
Anne | Maia Mackwilliams
Freddie | Steven Smith
Waiter | Philip Jones
Hitler | Iain Gibbons
Doctor | John Atkinson
Bok/Hoss | Matt Humphries
Elizabeth | Helen Flanagan
Despatch Rider | Richard Atkinson
Eichmann | Eamonn Corbett
Dietrich | Nerys Jones
Hospital patient | Kate Lingley

All other parts played by members of the company

Synopsis

How does a good man react to the rise of the Nazis, in the absence of any opposition? What would you do? How culpable are you now for the crimes of your country? Is loving your family and being a good husband ever enough?

Good by C.P. Taylor is perhaps the most intelligent play ever written about the Third Reich. It forces its audience to question itself: if I were there, would I have reacted any differently? Would I have made a stand, or merely kept my head down? Am I keeping my head down now?

The play tells the story of John Halder, a liberal academic whose best friend is Jewish, and who, slowly, by degrees, through a series of small petty lies to himself, by rationalising, through cowardice and being flattered, finds himself at the gates of Auschwitz, in full SS regalia, in charge. Here he has the tiniest inkling that something, somewhere, has gone terribly, horribly wrong.

Halder’s mother has the onset of senile dementia. Torn by this he writes a novel which advocates euthanasia on humane grounds. The Nazis ask him to write a paper on the subject. From this it’s a small step to joining the party, organising book burning (‘one of the chief defects of a University is learning from books. Not from experience…’ he tells himself) and soon he is planning the extermination of mental defectives and finally, is asked to be an inspector for the resettlement camps – starting with that one in Upper Silesia…

The other main strand to the story is his relationship with his best friend, Maurice, who is a psychiatrist and a Jew. As a friend Maurice analyses Halder, giving him advice, listening to Halder’s increasingly bizarre auditory and finally visual hallucinations. But Halder is blind to Maurice’s problems which are more terrifyingly real. ‘There’s legislation coming in the next few days…In the next day…Today…Maybe yesterday. Against men without foreskins…’

Halder’s cowardice prevents him from doing anything. He continually argues to himself that the racial aberration can only last another six months, the German people will reject Hitler, all sensible Jews will have left the county by now. Guiltily he meets Maurice in parks in mid-winter and still he refuses to help. Eventually Maurice disappears – and in Halder’s imagination, on Kristallnacht, they meet one more time for a final confrontation.

The form of the play is presented as the unravelling of his memories from 1933 to that moment at the gates of Auschwitz (which is around 1941). The narrative jumps from memory to memory with split or multiple scenes much in the way that memory itself works with one incident sparking off another (and ‘incorrect’ characters appearing in the ‘wrong’ scene to start a new one off as each scene ‘bleeds’ into another.)

The set will be a bare stage with cyclorama at the back on which will be occasionally projected images (book burning, gates of Auschwitz etc.). Scenes will have a minimum of furniture being set up by the cast until the stage is cluttered – then gradually stripped away in the second half until we are at the gates of Auschwitz itself.

As Germany slips into madness Halder suffers, himself, from a form of auditory hallucination he hears the popular bands of the 1930s, sings Wagner to his wife and experiences joining the SS as the drinking chorus from The Student Prince. Oliver Sacks details similar auditory hallucination in the book Musicophilia. The music is to be thought of as being constantly heard by Halder in the background even when we, the audience, do not hear it. He can ‘change channel’ when he wishes to (i.e. induce a specific song when required) but often it takes him by surprise. Occasionally the hallucinations take on physical manifestation. The music will be from original recordings of the 1930s and more recent classical recordings.

The National Theatre have included it in their top 100 plays of the 20^th Century; it was recently a successful film starring Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs; and of the play Benedict Nightingale stated: ‘If a grandchild or a Martian asked me how the nation of Beethoven and Goethe came to perpetrate the greatest of crimes, I would suggest they saw or read it.’

Taylor is reported to have said that the play is about ‘anywhere and everywhere’ – the play is still firmly rooted in ‘now’ which for Taylor it would have been Vietnam but the facts of Iraq and Afghanistan vindicate the play as do current self-delusions about ‘bringing democracy’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’.

Everyman Theatre’s production was directed by Simon Futty and played at Chapter Arts Centre from 15-19 November 2011.

The Hypochondriak (also known as 'Le Malade Imaginaire' or ‘The imaginary invalid’) is Moliere’s final play, first performed in 1673. During the fourth performance, on February 17th, Moliere, who was playing Argan, the invalid, became ill and died soon after. The play includes a number of ‘comedies-ballets’ – interludes of speech, song and dancing – the music for which was composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.

Everyman Theatre’s production is to be directed by Eric Hadley and will show on the main stage at Chapter Arts Centre from tonight until Saturday 26 March 2011. You can download a copy of the flyer here!

Running times: 1 h 15, interval (20 minutes) 45 minutes. Please note that these running times are approximate.

Book on-line now at the Chapter Box Office

Cast List

The cast list for this production reads as follows:

Argan | Simon Futty
Beralde | Brian Smith
Toinette | Sarah Green
Beline | Grainne Joughin
Angelique | Sarah Madden
Cleante | George Nichols
M. Diafoirus | John Atkinson
T. Diafoirus | Iain Gibbons
Louison | Alys Pearce
M. Purgon | Mike Picardie
M. Bonnefoy/M.Fleurant | Andreas Constantinou

Rehearsals are now well underway

Summary

The play is about a miser, Argan, who imagines himself sick when he is not. He dutifully sticks to any instructions given to him by his doctor. His doctors milk his hypochondria for all it is worth, which leads eventually to their demise. Argan wants his daughter Angelique to marry a doctor so he can get free medical care, even though she is already in love with Cleante. Together with Argan's maid Toinette, his brother Beralde attempts to cure Argan of his fixation on doctors. Together, they convince him to play dead, in order to find out who is really loyal to him. As it turns out, Argan's second wife is only after his money, whereas his daughter really loves him. After the revival of the supposedly-dead Argan, Angelique is free to marry whomever she chooses.

Director's Note

It’s my intention to use the translation by John Wood which is published by Penguin and although it came out in 1959 I still prefer it to others I’ve looked at.  I am able to manage the original text – in fact, it was my first experience of Moliere when I was an A Level student. ‘Le malade imaginaire’ doesn’t present the first problem of translation which many other Moliere plays do. Unlike them it is not written in ‘alexandrines’ –the 12 syllable couplet rhyme form of French classic theatre – which doesn’t sound too comfortable to English ears used to the looser, unrhymed pentameter form.  The play is mostly in prose apart from the interludes with their poetic lyrics and the final interlude which has Argan inducted as a doctor in a parodic ceremony written in an invented language which is a chaotic mixture of Latin, Italian and French.

I think what Wood does manage to find an English for is the range of Moliere’s language – from the elevation and preciousness of the lovers to the colloquial vigor of the servant Toinette, from the argumentative precision of Beralde to the obfuscatory and impenetrable jargon of the doctors. This is a play for people who love the play of language – its capacity for truth and clarity which is constantly being undermined by those who use it to deceive and cloud meaning for their own benefit or to pursue their own fantasies. It’s a play whose language reflects a culture which thrives on argument,  conversation and litigiousness  about the latest developments in religious, philosophical and scientific matters and who or what is the latest fashion.  

Although Moliere played before Louis XIV, he always remained an outsider- passionate, argumentative, deeply offensive and loathed by his enemies. I hope we can bring that out in this production and do justice to the dangerousness of his comedy. His comic vision contains a darkness which is grotesque, oppressive and destructive. There are voices of rationality and healthy vigour and good sense but the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. Keeping them at bay for a while is about as good as it gets. There is no curing Argan of his obsessions- accommodating it is the best that can be done.

The comedies-ballets which punctuated the action of the play are central to Moliere’s concept of providing relief and liberation from the darkness I’ve hinted at, something which takes the audience into a more colourful, fantastical world. I’m not planning on using the original music and song but there will be interludes of music, dance and comedy which will take the audience into a contrasting world. I don’t want to say too much about that at the moment- but all will be revealed!

~ Eric (director)