Other meanings of good
Drama
Good is a 1981 play by the Scottish-German playwright C. P. Taylor about John Halder, a liberal-minded German professor whose private compromises draw him into the machinery of Nazi rule. Set during the rise of Nazi Germany, the drama examines how ordinary ethical concessions can coexist with cultivated taste, intellectual self-image, and political crime.1
Good follows John Halder as professional success and personal instability make him increasingly useful to the Nazi state. Halder is not introduced as a committed ideologue; he is a professor of literature who regards himself as humane, civilized, and politically moderate. His academic work on euthanasia helps attract official attention, while his desire to protect his family, career, and social position encourages successive acts of accommodation.1
The play uses a highly theatrical, non-naturalistic structure. Halder often speaks directly to the audience, and scenes move rapidly between domestic conversation, academic discussion, bureaucratic pressure, and moments of historical violence. This arrangement makes his self-justifications part of the action rather than presenting the story as a distant historical reconstruction. The title is therefore ironic: “good” describes both Halder’s self-conception and the moral language used to disguise wrongdoing.
The play’s central historical context is the Nazi persecution and murder of people classified as mentally or physically disabled. The regime’s so-called euthanasia program used medical authority, administrative procedures, and euphemistic language to organize mass killing before and alongside the Holocaust. Taylor connects this history to the respectable institutions in which Halder works, emphasizing that atrocity can depend on offices, forms, professional expertise, and habits of obedience as well as on spectacular violence.
Good is not a documentary account of one historical figure. Its ethical argument is broader: the danger lies in the distance between a person’s moral vocabulary and the consequences of his conduct. Halder’s cultivated interests in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and music do not prevent complicity; instead, cultural refinement becomes one of the means by which he continues to see himself as decent.2
Good was first produced at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in 1981 and became one of C. P. Taylor’s best-known plays. Its combination of historical subject matter, direct address, and sharply shifting theatrical planes suited both intimate studio staging and larger institutional productions. The play subsequently received major British and international revivals, including a Broadway production in the early 1980s.1
A feature-film adaptation, also titled Good, was released in 2008, with Viggo Mortensen playing Halder and Vicente Amorim directing.3 Stage productions generally preserve the play’s immediate address and compressed transitions, whereas the film can render historical environments, railway journeys, and institutional spaces more literally. The change of medium also shifts attention from Halder’s verbal rationalizations toward his physical presence and the visual scale of the surrounding regime.
Good’s less obvious subject is the moral status of interpretation itself. Halder is a reader and teacher, and the play repeatedly asks whether explaining a text, a policy, or a political situation can become a way of evading responsibility. His intellectual vocabulary does not merely decorate the drama; it supplies the categories through which he separates intention from consequence.
The play also complicates the familiar image of Nazi perpetrators as uniformly fanatical. Halder’s concessions are shaped by fear, vanity, fatigue, marital conflict, and professional ambition, but the play does not treat those pressures as excuses. Its unsettling force comes from showing complicity as incremental and socially legible. In that respect, Good belongs both to Holocaust drama and to the modern political tradition of examining ordinary participation in extraordinary crimes.
The play’s historical subject is the Nazi euthanasia program, but John Halder is a fictional character rather than a direct portrait of a documented individual.
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