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This is a curious revival, presumably as a star vehicle for David Tennant, of a play by the rarely performed, campaigning, Glaswegian playwright, C P Taylor. He died in 1981 just as this (his 80th piece) was about to transfer to the West End. The RSC had premiered it in what is now the Donmar Warehouse and it subsequently had a run on Broadway.

Considering the sheer volume of plays, films and TV on Holocaust subjects, most of them much better than this, it is difficult to see why this merits a revival now. In the past few years alone Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt and Maggie Smith’s solo in A German Life covered the terrain with much greater insight and nuance. Smith brilliantly played Goebbels’ secretary and so it explored how ordinary Germans rolled in their necks and turned the other cheek, a far more interesting approach than this shrill treatise on ‘goodness’.

David Tennant plays John Halder, a liberal German professor with a Jewish best friend Maurice (the great Elliot Levey) and a fragile wife Annie played by Sharon Small, who also plays his lover Helen and his nagging, ailing mother - director Dominic Cooke has reshaped the piece with Tennant playing the pivotal character and Levey and Small doubling up all the other roles.

The play takes place between 1933 and 1942 in Frankfurt. From the outset John and Maurice try to convince each other that Nazi anti-Semitism will burn itself out soon. Maurice isn’t convinced but John finds it all merely illogical, "a temporary racist aberration". The play is therefore being positioned as a dire warning to us all but, again, the first person to shout "Hitler" in an argument these days is usually the one losing it.

The play stresses the normality of Halder who, because of his war record, is quickly swept up into a senior position in the SS. An academic interest in euthanasia doesn’t harm his prospects either.

Cooke utilises Tennant’s trademark boyish charm to underline Halder’s good sense. But in a cleverly staged scene we watch him slowly change clothes and into an SS officer’s uniform as he is about to head off to police what turns out to be Kristallnacht. His banal exchanges of kisses with his wife are like those of a departing morning commuter. The effect is chilling.

The problem with Tennant’s self-conscious performance though, is that as the self-deceit levels rise he doesn’t have the gravitas or stillness to convince as someone who is fooling himself but doesn’t care that he is. Halder even makes the case to Maurice, whom he continues to surreptitiously meet in a park for as long as they can, that ‘didn’t the Jews just bring it on themselves?’. Are we still meant to feel sorry for the well-intentioned liberal?

Vicki Mortimer’s modernist set, two enveloping walls of forbidding grey, work well for the multi-layered scenes and Will Stuart’s great use of popular music of the time and some new compositions greatly enhance the ambience. And Cooke brings some deft directorial touches, such as an utterly piercing audio-only staging of Kristallnacht or the gleeful scenes of book burning, but they fail to lift a text that really has nothing new to add to the subject.

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