GOOD is centred on the life and work of Professor Halder, whose intellectual studies into Goethe, but more importantly his authorship of a pro-euthanasia novel, brings him to the attention of Hitler’s Nazi party. The play depicts the life of a man who is drawn into the evils of Hitler’s regime not through any evil or barbaric tendencies, but as a route to advancing his career and social standing.
Halder’s acceptance of the ways of the German Nationalists lead him to reject his wife and children, his closest friend, and find plausible explanations for unjustifiable atrocities committed by his comrades in arms. More than anything, the play illustrates the way that Hitler’s rise to power was a gradual process. People were swept along on a wave of propaganda and lies to the point of being blind to the damage that they were helping to inflict upon innocent people.
GOOD is a chilling and provocative examination of how an upright individual can degenerate to a state of moral depravity.
