Henry Goodman, interview: destined to be the bad guy Yet Arturo Ui, surely, is in a different league to the mad, bad and alluringly unpleasant parts he has played to acclaim in the past - Richard III at the RSC, or those cynical lawyers Billy Flynn in Chicago and Roy Cohn in Angels in America. Doesn't entertaining the crowds as an ersatz Hitler call for an ethical stock-take if you're Jewish, as Goodman is? How does an actor who won an Olivier Award for his Shylock in Trevor Nunn's peerless 1999 National revival of The Merchant of Venice reconcile himself to playing, albeit at one remove, the worst anti-Semite of them all? Brechtian devices notwithstanding, he's helping to re-incarnate a monster who would have had him dispatched to the gas chambers without hesitation. Maybe that adds something. Jonathan Church, his director, thinks it lends "a frisson, an extra interest." Goodman flashes me a tense grimace when I wonder aloud about all this. He's very talkative, very polite, but cagey. "Part of me wants to resist this line of inquiry," he says. Clearly there's a special sense of engagement for me as a Jew playing the part, but I feel it would be a real shame to let that be the big issue. For Goodman, Ui is both smaller than Hitler - an Americanised, Al Capone figure whose actions don't fully touch on the horrors of the Holocaust (the piece was written in 1941) and he's also greater, more generic; he's every tin-pot dictator who should have been stopped in his tracks and wasn't. The primary rationale for reviving the piece, he argues, is its relevance. A play about corruption, gangsters, unions, recession? This is the time to do it. The last line of the play is really important: 'The bitch that bore him is in heat again. We are in an era where, whether it's Iran, Syria or even Le Pen in France, we've got new insights into those lines. Brecht wrote the play to tell Americans, 'This can happen in your culture, too - inconceivable though it sounds. He understands that times of economic distress are dangerous. The play says to the audience: 'Have a great evening but remember, this is going on around you." " So this isn't a case of squaring up to a personal nemesis or confronting the darkest chapter of 20th-century Jewish history. For me it's important to do this as a human being, rather than for any Jewish imperative. When we meet, the plan is for Goodman to sport a toothbrush moustache but he's more interested in going behind the caricature. Just as you've got to explore the way Shylock is made murderous and villainous by the way he has been treated, so you've got to understand how the humanity has got perverted in Ui. I've got to care about him because to send him up is easy. I want the audience to do more than just revile him. The person who is most frightened is Ui - because he's terrified of being ignored. Goodman was an East End boy, the youngest (a twin brother) of six. "I absolutely know the roots of this culture, where you put on the smile and you get what you want," he says. The Blind Beggar [the Whitechapel pub where Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell] was up the road. They would put their arms round old ladies, send flowers to people, help out at the boxing club - but if someone wanted them to beat the ---- out of somebody then they would do it. And they considered themselves nice guys. Goodman has gone on a remarkable journey, from the backstreets of Whitechapel - a place of refuge for his grandparents, who had fled late-19th-century pogroms in Eastern Europe - to the main stages of British theatre. One of the ironies of his career is that it all started aged 10 with a bit-part as a concentration-camp inmate in a British film called Conspiracy of Hearts (1960). "There's a picture of me in Woman's Weekly standing with these other kids in striped pyjamas behind some barbed wire," he remembers. And now he's playing Arturo Ui. But the play's the thing, he repeats - his own story is incidental. "I'd love to see if we can do this," he says. "It would be amazing if we made people think, 'What if I had been in those crowds in Germany - might I too have been swayed?" " He considers the ground. I don't want to let the audience off the hook. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," Minerva Studio, Chichester, until July 28.