Helen is voted in as new PM
HELEN McCRORY will play a Tory premier ‘hanging on to power’ in Roadkill, a new BBC1 drama written by David Hare. Hugh Laurie (below right), who plays one of her ministers fighting for his political career, was already announced in connection with the show. But yesterday Hare confirmed that McCrory will play a prime minister called Dawn Ellison.
The writer told me the four-part political thriller is about ‘the future of the Conservative Party but after Brexit’. At the heart of it is Laurie’s Peter Laurence, a minister who ‘puts freedom as the ultimate virtue in his life’. The drama looks at the effect this has on those close to him.
Hare said it is ‘really about shamelessness, and how the rules in the 21st century have changed. It used to be that when you committed a “crime”, there was something called disgrace. But no longer’.
He added: ‘We can see that in politics throughout the world,’ citing behaviour by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Hare noted that Trump has said ‘a number of things which no other president would get away with’, while Johnson ‘is somebody who is known to have consistently lied’. (He was once sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, he pointed out; and also from a newspaper for making up quotes.) Because shamelessness is no longer seen to be disgraceful ‘so the rules of 21st- century politics are completely different’.
Hare stressed that Roadkill is ‘not remotely about Boris Johnson, Theresa May or Brexit’. ‘It is not in any way based on real people,’ he insisted.
But people could be forgiven, I suggested, for thinking that both this, and his last play I’m Not Running (which reviewers assumed was about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn), were based at least in part on real-life politicians?
‘No, I can’t forgive them,’ Hare said impatiently, adding that members of the public had no trouble understanding that I’m Not Running was ‘political fiction’, and will do the same with Roadkill.
He further stressed that McCrory’s PM is neither Margaret Thatcher nor Mrs May. ‘Unfortunately, we’re so short on role models of a woman prime minister that people will think it’s one of the two,’ he said. ‘But I promise you it’s neither.’
He made one concession, however, about Laurie’s character, describing him as ‘that most attractive phenomenon: the working-class Tory’.
Hare said his fictional creation ‘worked his way up, as John Major did’, describing the former PM as ‘an authentic prime minister’. So he conceded that ‘there’s a little bit of John Major in Peter Laurence’.
But he said, rather vehemently, there are ‘no Old Etonians’ in the show. ‘That’s one of his [Laurence’s] virtues,’ he said, with a laugh, as he spoke to me on the phone from the property he shares with his wife in France.
Asked whether Laurence’s transgressions involve women and sex, he said they involved business and corruption.
The BBC production, a joint effort with The Forge production company, also stars Hare’s frequent collaborator Saskia Reeves as Peter Laurence’s wife. Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen, who starred in Borgen, plays ‘a friend of Peter’s’.
‘You mean his mistress?’ I asked.
AT WHICH he responded: ‘That’s a very Daily Mail word’, before revising his description of the role to ‘close friend’.
Ophelia Lovibond and Millie Brady play Laurence’s daughters. Patricia Hodge has been asked to play the proprietor of a newspaper involved in a libel action with Laurence.
Sarah Greene, who starred in the just completed Dublin Murders, plays an investigative journalist; while Pippa Bennett-Warner is a lawyer.
Olivia Vinall, who was in Hare’s Chekhov stage adaptations, is also in the company, along with Iain De Caestecker, Katie Leung, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Danny Ashok and Pip Torrens (so good playing Tommy Lascelles, private secretary to George VI and Elizabeth II in The Crown).