By Neil Norman

THE BEST MAN Playhouse Theatre, until May 12 Tickets: 0844 871 7631

GORE VIDAL’S play about backstage political machinations during a presidential campaign premiered in 1960 but it might have been written this year. Director Simon Evans wisely avoids updating the context of his star-studded production to the Trump era for one simple reason: he does not need to. Vidal’s portrait of political infighting, blackmail and power-broking rings as true now as it did then.

In a Philadelphia hotel two candidates compete for the endorsement of outgoing President Hockstader (Jack Shepherd, terrific as a jaded political horse trader).

Martin Shaw’s William Mitchell is informed and erudite, quoting Shakespeare and the classics in his campaign speeches. Jeff Fahey’s Senator Joseph Cantwell is a good ol’ Southern boy who cuts to the chase in a ruthless display of ambition. It is a contest of opposites: patrician versus populist.

Shaw is solid as the decent, high-minded but promiscuous Mitchell while Fahey (best known for The Lawnmower Man) plays Cantwell like a reptile in a bull’s skin.

While the female roles are underwritten, Honeysuckle Weeks does a good job as Cantwell’s adoring and sexy wife Mabel and Glynis Barber is a revelation as Mitchell’s frosty, frustrated consort Alice. The estimable Maureen Lipman supplies most of the comedy as a campaigning patron while David Tarkenter is unnervingly effective as Cantwell’s former army colleague in possession of information about his past that might ruin his image.

Unlike James Graham’s recent political dramas, Vidal’s play is conventional in structure – a character conflict with a thriller momentum. But Vidal was born into a politically affiliated family which gave him a grasp of the system and its language and this offers rich theatrical meat.

Slick, pacy and packed with great dialogue (“I’d like to think intelligence is contagious. But I’m afraid it isn’t”), this is dirty tricks a gogo on an elevated level.