Superb restaging of a political upheaval with present-day parallels
Maydays The Other Place, Stratford-upon-avon
As the party conference season reaches its zenith in Birmingham, with the world a-twitter about Theresa May’s ailing premiership, one of Brummie playwright David Edgar’s most coruscating gems – hailing from the turbulent heyday of Thatcherism – has been prised from the vaults and given a proper repolish for the first time since it was staged by the RSC in 1983.
In a bar area at The Other Place festooned with contextually useful cuttings, one snippet caught my eye: a quotation from Irving Kristol, the so-called “godfather of neoconservatism”: “The most important political event of the 20th century is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.”
There in a nutshell you have the focal issue of Edgar’s mighty opus, which launches from May Day 1945 across the 20th century in a bid to fathom how the Left got lost and how the Right – bolstered by “defectors” like Kristol (a former Trotskyite) – attained a sense of mission that won over the working classes.
Edgar was writing in the wake of Thatcher’s landslide re-election, and at a point when those clinging to the notion of the USSR’S virtues looked ever more desperate and despicable. Yet the piece – running to more than three hours – is no cheer-leading hurrah for the ascendancy of brute common-sense. Instead it’s an exhilarating Left-wing insider’s assessment of a multi-faceted, idealistically driven political movement that at its sharpest edges showed a fatal inability to critique itself, and thereby adapt.
Updating a tad, Edgar – the man who distilled Nicholas Nickleby into an RSC triumph in 1980 – compresses several seminars’ worth of material into a hurtling voyage of intellectual discovery, and disillusion, for his young protagonist.
Martin (originally Antony Sher, here the likeable and capable Mark Quartley), a wide-eyed vicar’s son, travels to America in the Summer of Love, as violent activism takes hold; he then washes up in the Midlands – doing an MA on the antiwar movement – and falls in with student revolutionary socialists, only to fall out with them definitively at a party celebrating the fall of Saigon, delivering an impassioned denunciation of socialism’s failings and human rights abuses.
Woven into the skittish action is the parallel journey of a victim of Communist oppression – a rogue Russian soldier called Lermontov, who becomes an incarcerated dissident and gets swapped on Berlin’s “Bridge of Spies”; but he becomes a refusenik at the altar of capitalist democracy just as Martin emptily weds himself to the era of market forces.
It threatens to be over-stuffed, and occasionally creaks with contrivance, but director Owen Horsley, marshalling a superb company of 10, keeps things moving with fleet-footed, period-hopping élan – ambushing the audience with radically different auditorium configurations twice and even springing guerrilla “happenings” in the foyer. An invaluable historical treatise, then, Maydays undoubtedly possesses a timely resonance amid the resurgence of the hardleft. But does it equally force us to reflect on the political Right, and its own doubtfilled, May-day moment right now? You bet.