Word: haider
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
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...
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 Führer 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...
...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...