Dr. Hans Halder is a good man. He is a German scholar and reasonably successful professor at Frankfurt University, but he hears music in his head almost all the time: from pop hits to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. But nobody knows about this except his best friend, the Jewish psychiatrist Moritz. He takes touching care of his mother, who has dementia, his family and his wife, who suffers from lack of motivation and depression. Recently, one of his students has been making eyes at him. But he is a good man and is honestly fighting his way through all the adversities of the middle years of an occidental academic's life. But the year is 1933 and the National Socialists have just taken over the government in Germany. As much as Halder deeply despises them, he is suddenly surprised by reasonable-sounding offers to make himself useful to the "new Germany". And you can't let these incompetent bullies make important decisions without expert advice, can you? The most important thing is to remain a good person and not allow yourself to be taken in.
In his play with the simple original title "Good", which is considered one of the most important and most frequently performed political plays of the 1980s in the English-speaking world, the Scottish-Jewish teacher, writer and activist Cecil Philip Taylor, who died young, describes logically consistent and at the same time not unpoetically how a single person and an entire people can push away their increasing entanglement in injustice, indeed in monstrosity, through rational argumentation. The road to hell is paved with small steps and a clear conscience.
An Austrian premiere. Translation & staging: Buno Max
Premiere: Saturday, March 2, 2024, at 7:45 pm
Further performance days:
March 5 - 23, 2024, Tue - Sat, at 7:45 p.m.
www.theaterzumfuerchten.at
