I’ll never forget standing on West 45th Street in January 1983 and eyeballing the almost side-by-side marquees for the Booth and the Plymouth (now the Gerald Schoenfeld theatre), and laughing quietly to myself about C.P. Taylor‘s Good being at the Booth and David Hare‘s Plenty playing at the Plymouth. And you know what? There are no online photos of this, probably the dopiest Broadway marquee juxtaposition in history.

In any event, Plenty re-appeared three years later as a Meryl Streep movie directed by Fred Schepisi. (My favorite line: “He proposed to me in a moment of weakness. Mine, I mean.”) And yet it’s taken Good 25 years to be made into a film.
The Good movie, directed by the Brazilian-born Vicente Amorim (who’s rumored to be loosely related to Duchess director Saul Dibb), will show at the Toronto Film Festival. Viggo Mortensen plays Halder alongside Jason Isaacs, Mark Strong, Steven Mackintosh and Gemma Jones in the flick.
Written in ’81, Good is regarded as Taylor‘s most successful play. It’s about Halder, a thoughtful German professor whose wimpishness and gradual corruption leads to his involvement with National Socialsm in the 1930s. The point of the play is that Halder sees himself as a reasonable good guy even as he succumbs more and more to the swatztika. Are there are parallels in the current American political arena? Naaah.