We could do with a bit of Shakespeare to get us through the political overload

Line of Duty is up there with the very best

IMADE a life-changing discovery this week. I am officially middleaged and middle-class and it’s OK. Instead of pretending to enjoy getting my head kicked in at the front of a gig where I don’t understand what’s happening and people assuming I’m there to collect the children I don’t have, I have gently given in and this week experienced the pure joy of watching Shakespeare live at the cinema.

There. I’ve said it. And if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right any more. It was almost better than going to the proper theatre because you could actually see what was going on, as opposed to being sat behind the biggest barnet in the joint, you could have a nice wine and a small snack served at your sofa and, best of all, there was no queue for the ladies’ loo in the interval which, let’s be honest, is unheard of. Oh, and there was a nice interview with Mary Beard at the start. What’s not to love?

But the biggest reveal was how much I genuinely enjoyed the live broadcast from Stratford of the RSC’s spirited and rather bloody performance of Julius Caesar and how relevant it felt. There is always a modern-day resonance to Shakepeare’s work, and you can read into his words pretty much what you like, but as we ponder where we are in British politics less than six weeks away from a historic election, the themes in Julius Caesar feel particularly enduring. Or maybe it’s because I’m officially old now.

I managed to leave my London metropolitan-elite bubble to travel to Stratford for an excellent discussion at the RSC around this theme at the weekend where everyone was drawing political comparisons.

You can see the tragedy of the Labour Party as it used to be with Tony Blair being Caesar and Gordon Brown being Brutus. You can see the challenges facing Theresa May today in the early scenes of the tensions between the crowds and the ruling class. And, of course, in Brexit, Trump, and the French elections, we see the story of THE BBC’s Line of Duty provided us with strong and stable nail-biting suspense from start to finish, and Sunday’s finale had more deception and leaks than dinner with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. It drew together an impossible number of strands covering murder, amputation, betrayal, kidnap, corruption, gangs and left us with some tantalising questions such as: who is the mysterious H? Where will it all end? Who on earth hangs up a tracksuit?

The writing by Jed Mercurio was gripping, clever and ratcheted up the tension week by week but also had laugh-out lines such as “let’s dial down the Ian Paisley”. how people are getting a taste for challenging the established order, overturning hierarchies and how modern leaders deal with populist anger about elites. It’s all there.

But what also struck me was the passion of the play (well, it was the RSC at its best, to be fair) and the energy of the political discussion around it, compared to the rather arid, dead-eyed nature of this actual election campaign.

We are already bored to tears of the soundbites and the predictable slogans and by the tried and tested stage-managed optics. Where is the passion and the poetry from any of our national voices? Who can belt out that spinetingling moment these days? Where

The acting was superb. Thandie Newton’s glacial portrayal of DCI Roz Huntley, right, is one of her best performances and her ability to frame someone even with one hand was pretty impressive. Ted Hastings, the oldschool senior officer who runs AC-12 (the corruption unit that sniffs out bent coppers), now has his own Twitter handle.

Line of Duty proves British TV is as good as American or Scandinavian content and I’m sure many Baftas await. art thou? And from Bristol.

Now I realise that it’s naïve to start expecting our political leaders to don a toga and start spouting A-level Shakespeare but I feel we are all crying out for a bit more theatre to our politics to lift our democracy-weary souls. But as our politicians hit the campaign trail they would be wise to remember that “All the world’s a stage”.

Maybe it falls to the artists, writers, actors, poets and satirists of today to help get us through the next six weeks and beyond. If they can’t make sense of it all, hopefully they can give us a much-needed laugh. After all, Melissa McCarthy’s Saturday Night Live send-up of Whitehouse press secretary Sean Spicer is probably the greatest piece of political art on the planet right now. Ayesha Hazarika will be performing her standup show, State of the Nation, at the Soho Theatre from May 8-10 before going on a UK tour.

I don’t mean Brenda