Political drama’s as sharp as a whip
This House (NT at Home, YouTube)
Verdict: Still rocks the house ★★★★✩
Unprecedented (BBC iPlayer)
Verdict: Unexciting ★★★✩✩
THIS House is the Westminster political drama that keeps on giving. It’s the third time I’ve seen James Graham’s brilliant play and, if anything, it’s grown in stature thanks to the hung parliament shenanigans of last year.
But where those events were a kind of rollercoaster, the hung parliament of the 1970s was more of a tightrope, with the Labour government eking out a majority of three, that dwindled to just one.
The brilliance of Graham’s play, of course, was to set the action in the whips’ offices, where majorities were secured by flushing MPs out of the Westminster loos. In the tooth-and-claw battle between Tories in Savile Row suits and Labourites in M&S polyester, every vote counted.
Stories running through the drama include John Stonehouse’s infamous attempt to disappear by faking his own suicide, and Michael Heseltine’s mace-wielding antics in the debating chamber.
But the play is also an anarchic hymn to the Westminster bubble where, as one character laments, everyone eventually fails — the Tories because they think they’re entitled; and the Labour Party, because they don’t.
This is the original Olivier Theatre cast from 2013, led by Phil Daniels as Labour’s saggy-suited, gutter-mouthed Cockney chief whip, Bob Mellish, alongside his snarling deputy, the Member for Wakefield, Walter Harrison (Reece Dinsdale).
Across the corridor, their Tory counterparts (Julian Wadham and Charles Edwards) are no less combative, despite being as cool as a jug of iced Pimm’s.
With fecund wigs, shagpile sideburns and flares flapping around the actors’ ankles, this remains a wonderful piece of social history from the mother-of-all hung parliaments.
■ MANY of us have been losing track of time in lockdown, with only our feral barnets to remind us every morning that the weeks are rolling by.
But BBC4’s series of ten-minute plays — commissioned, written, cast, rehearsed, shot and released in the time we’ve all been confined to quarters — under the title ‘Unprecedented’, are a salutary reminder of how long it’s been.
And with a set of leading thesps I had high hopes for it, too.
One of the better playlets, Grounded, stars Katherine Parkinson as a stressed working mum trying to get her parents (Alison Steadman with her reallife partner, Michael Elwyn) to take social distancing seriously. Their response is to prank her in a way that’s borderline poor taste.
One of the creepiest (in a bad way), Safer At Home, sees Gemma Arterton bullied and cyber-stalked by her own real-life husband, Rory Keenan. Another, House Party, is about an online street party, to which a whiskery-looking James Norton can’t manage to get connected.
With many more sketches, including one featuring a very serious Rory Kinnear as a frontline NHS doctor, and another with Lennie James as a homeless man put up in a hotel and missing his dog, these are moderately distracting snapshots of where we’ve pitched up.
As a lockdown diversion, though, they leave a lot to be desired — and not just in terms of length.
It’s a good chance to check out the actors’ interior design, too, including Rory Kinnear’s AGA (and Ottolenghi cookbook).