These Lefties are all right!
Vote with your feet and catch this New Labour drama (even if its plotting isn’t a patch on real life)
AMartin Freeman plays David, a Labour MP aboutabo to lose his working- class Nottingh Nottinghamshire seat on election night 2017. Dav David was a Cabinet minister under Tony BlairBla or Gordon Brown (we are not told which)whic and has always argued that Centrism is how to win votes. But now Labour h has become the party of university sity townstown and ‘ooh la-di-dah Battersea’ while old mining towns are turning Tory.
Tamsin Greig is a late addition to the cast, thoughtho you would not know it from her assuredassur performance.
She playspla Jean, David’s long-standing constitu constituency agent. Jean is Oldish Labour, a provincial socialist who could see that New Labour’s compromised electabil electability was preferable to ideological purity in defeat under Michael Foot.
At this stage, you may be clasping your temples, groaning: ‘We’ve had our bellyful off politics,lit please!’ Believe me, I sympathise. But this play is not just about nerdish Labour strategy. Directed by Jeremy Herrin, it is adroitly staged and the central relationship between the unhappily married male MP and his divorced female agent has potential.
Everything happens in David’s constituency office. The years ebb and flow. Whizzed- up video footage of major political moments haul us from 2017 back to the Thatcher years and points between. Mr Freeman dons a dicey wig to play David in younger years. Ms Greig’s hairdo changes are more convincing.
The office changes, too: the wall portraits of the different party leaders ( what a shock to be reminded of that clunker Ed Miliband!), the different Labour slogans over the years, the different TV equipment showing news footage from historic election nights. Mr Freeman, a Labour activist, is extremely good as moderniser David, genuine in his belief that the party should soften its socialism to lure the innately conservative British electorate.
This is all done with some subfarce comedy, a valiant turn from Rachael Stirling as David’s ludicrously hoity-toity corporate lawyer wife, and a few minor characters such as a Chinese businessman who is thinking of opening a factory in the constituency.
Mr Graham takes us through the Blairite ‘red Tories’ v Bennite Trots issue at some length, albeit with brio (and bad language). To see Freeman and Greig on stage is a pleasure. Could she maybe lend Jean just a smidgen more vulnerability earlier?
But how out of date the politics of this play felt. Where was Brexit? Mentioned only once!
WHERE was any discussion of immigration, which has been such an anguish to Labour people in English working-class areas? And where was the fever about Corbynism which was evident not only in Brighton last week, but also in Labour constituency offices, for good or ill, since the summer of 2015?
The audience enjoyed the nostalgia, sighing happily when they saw Teletext, a fax machine and an early Nineties mobile telephone. Though it may return one day, at present political centrism seems to have gone the same way as those defunct innovations and that makes this play feel less potent and truthful than it might have done a year or so ago.
I’m afraid that, at present, not even the most artful West End production can match real politics for raw theatre.