Goodness

Althea: Do you believe in your own death? Every moment you are alive is endless and the present goes on and on with you inside it. Of course the end is truly coming, but it’s so far off, and in the meantime the spring bulbs need bringing out of the dark and the windows must be cleaned. These distant murmurings of unrest are like the way you sometimes hear your name on the wind and you shudder. Because it’s eerie that the wind should know your name.

Our hero, the recently divorced Michael Redhill, goes to Poland to get away from his life and to do some research on the Holocaust. Thwarted by witnesses unwilling to talk, he returns home via England, but in London is introduced to someone who can tell him a ‘real’ story of evil, and genocide. Through the memory of the storyteller, who served as a prison guard, he encounters an alleged war criminal with Alzheimer’s who is about to be put on trial, along with the man’s beautiful daughter and an attorney who is eerily similar to the criminal he’s prosecuting. But has the old man’s guilt dissolved with his memory? Could he be pretending to be ill in order to escape punishment?

Who do we believe? A prison guard still wounded by history? A writer suffering from heartache? A dying war criminal? Who does memory serve? Did the past really happen? And if it did, who has a claim on it?

Goodness is a morality tale for the modern age. This remarkable play, by the award-winning author of Building Jerusalem and Martin Sloane, is a Russian-doll: concentric stories enveloping each other, inhabiting the gaps between experiencing, telling and hearing.