Many good men besides Albert Speer became Nazis. And many believed in the National Socialist programme while remaining (or choosing to remain) in the dark about the consequences.

Such is the mainspring of C. P. Taylor's hypnotic 1981 play, superbly revived in the Covent Garden venue where it was first seen with Alan Howard playing the fictional good man, John Halder. Charles Dance's upright Halder -- massive, erect, more blinkered than blinking -- is less anguished a portrait than Howard's, and therefore all the more chilling. Halder, whose blind, enfeebled mother (Faith Brook) is ushered by him towards a merciful release, becomes enmeshed with the Nazis after writing a novel which advocates euthanasia. He is just the sort of fellow needed to activate the full-scale extermination programme on humane grounds, and his progress to the gates of hell is almost imperceptible.

Halder's best friend is a Jew (an impassioned Ian Gelder) who asks for his help to leave the country. Dance trips lightly around this request without refusing it. So do we all duck and weave, the playwright suggests, when confronted with apparently simple moral choices and decisions. The show's theatricality, beautifully realised in Michael Grandage's production, stems from Halder's affliction of hearing imaginary bands and music everywhere.

A literary student (Emilia Fox, bright as a button), who steals him from his wife (Eva Marie Bryer), comes complete with a soundtrack of Richard Tauber songs. A domestic showdown is played out as a Wagnerian duet.

And when John Ramm's comic Hitler -- or is it Charlie Chaplin? -- waltzes on to a Jewish wedding march, the reality of the Third Reich remains a sideshow lit by searchlights and peopled by puppets. The distraction of art justifies rum behaviour. Music is a balm for all sores, a soothing compensation. Until we reach a stunning point of no return at Auschwitz, where a band in striped prison uniforms materialises playing a Schubert march. Now Halder really must face the music. Dressed to kill in his black uniform, he stands horrified at the entrance to the death camp.

C. P. Taylor's Good is on the National Theatre's list of the century's 100 best plays, and even a less-than-brilliant revival cannot undermine my belief that it merits a place near the very top. If a grandchild or a Martian asked me how the nation of Beethoven and Goethe came to perpetrate the greatest of crimes, I would suggest they saw or read it. Good was the last of Taylor's plays to be performed before his death in 1981 and it remains his boldest, for in it he used all his sympathetic imagination to enter the mind of a man who ends up helping to organise the slaughter of his, Taylor's, fellow-Jews.

Since the piece starts about 1933, finishes in 1941, and shows the Darwinian process by which a pleasant professor of literature evolves into an Auschwitz functionary, the play could have been numblingly schematic. Instead, it bubbles with restless energy, brims with wry but pointed observation. There are sudden switches of time and place, abrupt shifts from monologue to dialogue and, less happily, from song to speech. But the forward thrust is unstoppable, and the effect is to leave you wondering if you too could rationalise and deceive yourself into the abyss.

Charles Dance's Halder is impelled by a senile mother to write a novel advocating euthanasia and by a chaotic, demanding wife to safeguard his career by joining the party. Soon he is being courted by Nazis in search of helpful intellectuals and persuaded to exercise his "humane but unsentimental strengths" first in a subnormality hospital, eventually in far darker places. After all, if he is supervising the burning of books, or watching SS men smash Jewish homes, or putting Eichmann's orders into practice, he can minimise the thuggishness.

Halder's need to believe in his own compassion leads him into moral and mental contortions galore. The extermination of incompetents is a kindness, if only the gas-chamber is disguised as a bathroom. Anti-Semitism is a politically expedient aberration that, like Hitler himself, will soon pass. Jews are remarkable people, but they have shaped a literary tradition that is fixated on the individual, and have brought their agonies on themselves. Isn't it simplistic to think either that they are victims or that "good" is an objective absolute?

Taylor intended his attack on compromise to extend to you, me and himself, and from the past to the present and into the future; but Michael Grandage's revival sometimes leaves one feeling uneasy in the wrong way. There is little wrong with the supporting performers, who include Emilia Fox as Halder's earnest young lover and lan Gelder as the increasingly distraught Jewish friend he insidiously betrays.

But though he manages to seem plausibly decent even when elegantly attired in SS togs, Dance lacks the insecurity, the vulnerability, the slipperiness and finally the unacknowledged despair of the Faustian weakling Halder. But never mind. It is a part, and Good a play, that will be tackled again and again and again.

Back in 1992, the theatre programme at the Edinburgh Festival was given over to a retrospective of the plays of the Glaswegian-Jewish dramatist, CP Taylor, who died in 1981. Short of desecrating his grave, it is hard to see how this exercise could have had a less constructive effect on his posthumous career. The pieces were badly selected and indifferently produced. It only added insult to injury that the play reckoned to be Taylor's masterpiece, Good -- charting the process by which a decent, intelligent academic turns into a Nazi -- was reserved for the fag end of the festival.

Michael Grandage's beautifully skilful and sensitive production makes amends for this. In this staging, the emotional logic of the play's restless structure is as lucid as the shifting shafts of radiance and colour in Hartley TA Kemp's fine lighting design. The drama cross-cuts between scenes with a person suffering from senile dementia (Faith Brook), with a wife who is coming unravelled (an utterly convincing Jessica Turner), with an adoring pupil who becomes his mistress (Emilia Fox) and with a Jewish doctor friend (excellent Ian Gelder) who evolves into an embarrassment for Halder, our Aryan protagonist. A cunningly cast Charles Dance is an ideal choice to prove that even soulful-eyed sensitivity personified is no proof against steady attrition of self-preserving self-deception.

Artfully dotted, though, like little oases of flattering calm amidst this tragicomic turmoil, there is a staggered, blow-by-blow dramatisation of Halder's first meeting with a Nazi official when, on the strength of a mother-inspired pro-euthanasia novel he has written, he is approached and seduced into taking on the alleged role of humane monitor of the party's eugenic programmes. From there, the play itself monitors those individually understandable -- and collectively loathsome -- accommodations with conscience that can push a man into putting job, family and skin before ideals, principles and fellow men.

Grandage's production acutely highlights the contradictions in Halder's position. Like lost souls, Dance and Miss Fox seem to cling to each other for warmth in the crackling flames of the bonfire of burning books. "If we're good to each other -- and the people around us," she pleads, as if intoning some bankrupt mantra.

The fact that Halder cannot get dance band music out of his mind feels a bit sub-Dennis Potter in its juxtapositions and not especially well motivated and that, for me, slightly weakens the poignancy of the ending where, when he arrives at Auschwitz, he is horribly disconcerted to be greeted by an actual band of musical inmates. But the play and the production are very fine. It's an excellent touch that the Jewish doctor identifies with Germany and dislikes Jews (it's because Jews are human, not because they are good or bad Jews, that they should be free from persecution). It's also a heartening irony that the Jewish principle of sympathy for the individual as opposed to the bogus Nazi doctrine of "the common interest before self" should here be applied by a Jewish writer to a far from ideal German.

LONDON is suddenly full of plays about the Second World War and the Nazis. The most distinguished of them is Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, with its resonant account of the wartime meeting between Werner Heisenberg, then in charge of the German nuclear programme, and his mentor Nils Bohr.

At the Almeida there is Klaus Maria Brandauer's icily compelling performance as that "good" Nazi Albert Speer in a gripping new play by Esther Vilar, and now comes this revival of CP Taylor's Good, unseen in London since it premiered at this address in 1981.

There is nothing more tedious than critics banging on about the great productions of the past, but Good -- which made it on to the National Theatre's recent list of the 100 best plays of the century -- has always stayed with me. Alan Howard gave an unforgettable performance as the literary academic Halder, a nervy, abstracted figure with a Jew as his best friend who drifts gently but inexorably, into the welcoming arms of the Nazis, ending up as one of the architects of the Final Solution.

It struck me then as a profound, involving work that forces members of the audience to consider what their own reaction would have been had they found themselves in Germany in the Thirties. Are most of us complacent, pliable collaborators at heart?

Yet Michael Grandage's revival left me cool and unmoved. The play seems more sloppily written than it did -- with the exception of Halder, and his Jewish friend Maurice, the characterisation is alarmingly one-dimensional; and when the play ends up at the gates of Auschwitz you get the uncomfortable feeling that the drama is merely hitching a ride on the Holocaust. Yes, Good creates a frisson of horror as the inmates appear in their striped uniforms, but I'm not convinced that Taylor actually has anything worthwhile to say about the unimaginable horror of the death camps.

For in this second-rate production the play's basic failure is glaringly exposed. Halder is initially recruited by the Nazis because he has written a novel about mercy killing, inspired by his mother's senile dementia. But the dramatist's suggestion that Halder's drift into the practical organisation of mass extermination occurs without seriously disturbing his equanimity seems entirely unpersuasive. How much stronger the play would be if it let us into the mental compromises and the moments of agonised doubt and terror that would surely accompany such a journey into barbarism.

Howard was so endearing in his vulnerable vagueness that you somehow accepted Taylor's lack of insight. Charles Dance, however, an actor who often gives the impression that he thinks a handsome profile can make amends for a dull performance, is merely blandly unlikeable. As he leaves his inadequate wife for a young student admirer, shouts at his demented mother and abandons his Jewish friend to his fate, Dance totally fails to create the spell of complicity with the audience that can make the play so unsettling. Only his sudden, Conradian awareness of horror at the end achieves real impact.

Grandage's cold and empty production doesn't help. It's all stripped-down minimalism, with a modishly stark, greyslate design by Christopher Oram and an alarming absence of either chills or passion. Even the play's most potent device, in which Halder imagines he hears bands playing in his head at moments of stress, is diminished, for here we get only recorded background music rather than the disconcerting on-stage band of the original production.

Jessica Turner is touching as Halder's wife, Ian Gelder's Maurice supplies some much-needed moments of raw emotion as the Nazi threat intensifies, and, as the girlfriend, Emilia Fox's sense of personal goodness amid the evil is more persuasive than Dance's. Nevertheless, this remains a deeply disappointing revival that leaves a once highly regarded play looking cruelly exposed.

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