Is the political big beast running out of puff ?
Theatre I’m Not Running National Theatre
I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that David Hare, that big beast of British theatre, is back on his home turf: presenting an original stage drama about our political life at the National, scene of many a stimulating, wellresearched, well-argued “state of the nation” play from his nibs.
You have to go back to Gethsemane (2008), about Labour Party funding, and The Power of Yes (2009), which investigated the financial crisis, to find him doing what he does best: putting the body politic on the slab and opening it up. Aside from a Torybaiting contribution to a mixed bill at the Arts Theatre in 2016 – the prolonged period of silence has come to an end.
The bad news is that I’m Not Running doesn’t look like vintage Hare. It’s certainly valuable Hare. Valid Hare. But in the intervening period, so much has gone on, not least in terms of the re-ascendancy of the hard Left – that it’s as if he has identified a “thread” without fully putting his finger on the pulse.
I’m Not Running has been touted as a play for the Corbyn era. But just as you need to know the answer that opens and closes the evening – is she or isn’t she? (is his heroine Pauline Gibson running for the Labour Party leadership or not?) – so you may wind up arguing about whether it really tells us where we are, or not.
The evening begins with a tease, set in the here and now: Pauline’s assistant Sandy (a droll Joshua Mcguire) bats away a press-pack chorus of demands to know whether his boss, an independent MP (who it transpires has won hearts and minds by campaigning about the NHS), will throw her hat into the ring. We rewind to the Labour landslide year of 1997, when – in Newcastle – Siân Brooke’s Pauline, a gamine, feminist-resolute medical student is delicately giving her boyfriend (Alex Hassell’s handsome trainee lawyer Jack Gould) the shove.
In its chronological leaps, the piece recalls James Graham’s recent hit drama about the state of the Left – Labour of Love – and as with that play, the personal and the political are intertwined. Pauline, contending with an abused, alcoholic, terminally ill mother back home, is the model of non-attachment – which possibly manifests in her later, party-free commitment to single-issue causes. Gould – who has shades of a Miliband (his father was a famous Left-wing thinker) – is an archetype of sensible centrism: he turns to politics, endorsing the streamlining of the NHS (with attendant hospital closures) that Pauline campaigns against. Their ideological differences are stacked on the fault-lines of raw emotions.
Yet while there are powerful scenes in which they thrash through the mess of this, there’s still something schematic about it all. By abstaining from references to the political upheavals we’re familiar with – there’s no mention of the B-word, either Blair or Brexit; only scant allusion to the financial crisis – it’s as if we’re in a specially constructed theatrical lab, in which we’re able to hypothesise the conditions in which a female Labour leader might finally arise – at once a reflection of the Corbyn phenomenon, and rebuke to it.
It’s all done – as you’d expect – with supreme lightness of touch. Hare retains his facility for the well-turned phrase, the relief of a well-groomed joke. The performances are impeccable; the design, a stylish rotating room, is immaculate; the direction from Neil Armfield squeezes every nuance from the script. But set beside, say that masterly look at post-war disillusion, Plenty, with which Hare announced his talents 40 years ago, the cupboard looks a little bare. At 71, is he running out of puff?