Sarah and Martin to stage a Labour comeback
. . . and there are 20,000 £10 tickets up for grabs
Martin Freeman and Sarah Lancashire have elected to return to the stage to star in the world premiere of playwright James Graham’s new comedy about the clashes for the soul of the Labour Party.
the timing is incredible, with the General Election just weeks away. the play will open in the autumn, just as the party conferences get under way.
‘it’s an attempt to try to discuss the Labour Party and its evolution, from Blair to now,’ said Michael Grandage, whose MG theatre Company will produce Labour Of Love (as the work is called) with the progressive stage company Headlong in the West End in September.
But Grandage, Graham and Jeremy Herrin — the artistic director of Headlong, who will direct the show — stressed that the piece isn’t some dry, slap on the back political tract, where people address each other as ‘Comrade’.
rather, it’s a laugh-out-loud comedy, set miles away from the Westminster hothouse . . . in north nottinghamshire, in a post-industrial former mining town with a working class community. Lancashire will play Jean Whittaker, a constituency agent more aligned to the Party’s traditional wing, while Freeman will play David Lyons, the district’s modernising MP.
So it’s a play about two people — but it’s also about how new Labour shoved Old Labour, and how Old Labour (eventually) shoved back.
Graham, who wrote the acclaimed this House, which was set in the Commons, told me that all the big names — neil Kinnock, John Smith, tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn — will be heard, but not seen. it’s not a political history play.
appropriately, Labour Of Love will be canvassing for a wide audience, from many political and social persuasions. a quarter of the seats at each performance will go for £10. that’s 20,000 over the play’s 11-week run at the noel Coward theatre, from September 15 through to December 2.
GRAHAM argued the theatre is a public space, where people can get together and debate what they’ve seen. But he acknowledged ‘you can’t pretend that’s happening unless normal people can afford ticket prices’.
He said politics and theatre ‘face the same challenges about access’. the £10 seats were one of the founding principles of the Grandage company’s inaugural season five years ago. Offering seats for a tenner ‘sends an important signal’, Grandage insisted, particularly when those seats are spread around the auditorium, including stalls and the circle.
Graham told me Labour Of Love had been ‘percolating for five years’, while he pondered the purpose of the party, ‘past, present and future’.
in fact, the roots of the idea go back much further, to when the dramatist was growing up in the ashfield district of nottingham, where Geoff Hoon, a one-time defence secretary, was his local MP (a role now taken by Gloria De Piero).
the playwright said he thinks the play represents the conversation many are having about Labour. ‘i don’t think it’s too dramatic to say the party is in a state of crisis, over its identity, and how it reaches its traditional working class base.’
Sarah Lancashire’s Jean represents the traditional socialist wing. ‘She’s a diehard, fully paid-up member, so her roots, i suspect, go way back, ’ Lancashire said. and then she’s confronted with the polished, suited and booted ‘ Blairite Oxford and Cambridge type’. Everything that she opposes — and she can’t change.
the actress, who won a Bafta last weekend for her brilliantly observed role as a policewoman in the BBC hit Happy Valley, thought her character would really love Jeremy Corbyn. ‘He’d be her pin-up, i suspect!’
SHE had been looking for a chance to return to the theatre (her last foray onto the stage was six years ago, in the musical Betty Blue Eyes).
and with Sally Wainwright, the writer and creator of Happy Valley and Last tango in Halifax (in which Lancashire also starred), busy on other projects, it meant she suddenly had time free to tread the boards.
however, before rehearsals begin, she’s going to film a four-part drama for Channel 4.
martin Freeman was on stage more recently, in Jamie Lloyd’s production of richard III.
Freeman and herrin are working together for the first time since the actor made his professional stage debut, 22 years ago. he played the ‘third merchant’ in Volpone at the national; with michael Gambon in the lead, and herrin as the nt’s staff director.
Freeman laughed when he recalled how he left the Central School ‘on the Friday and was rehearsing at the national on the monday’. In the intervening years, he has become an international star, thanks to a list of films that include Love actually, hot Fuzz and the hobbit. he will appear in next year’s blockbuster the Black panther. and, of course, he’s huge in television’s Sherlock.
he said he was interested in Labour of Love because it mixed the personal with the political . . . ‘and it’s a kind of love story, too’.
the actor makes no secret of the fact he’s a Labour voter. ‘I’m hardly a huge political animal,’ he said. ‘But I am interested in plays that I think are moving and funny and timely. this couldn’t be more timely!’
he conceded that things do not look all that rosy for Labour at the moment (‘certain things look a certain way’). But added: ‘Donald trump is the president of the United States . . . so, stranger things have happened.’
Grandage told me that he and his colleagues are working on several other theatre projects, due to come to fruition in the next year or so. and he’s also busy preparing the stage production of the Disney mega hit Frozen, which will reach Broadway next year.
TICKETS for Labour Of Love are available via labouroflovetheplay.co.uk or by calling 0844 482 5141.