Not quite the play we’re crying out for
Hansard National’s Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1 ★★★★★
I’m caught in a hung-parliament state between admiration and disappointment. Hansard,
Simon Woods’s arrestingly titled debut play – which halloos a sense of topicality, referencing as it does Parliament’s famous transcription service – shows definite promise. Woods is a former actor who might yet become a major playwright. It offers a big treat, too: directed by Simon Godwin, it stars Lindsay Duncan and Alex Jennings, whose names have helped ensure that this run was almost sold out before press night – a boon for a theatre that has had a disastrous time of it when it comes to home-grown new work.
With both actors turning in compelling, Lyttelton stage-filling performances that live up to their reputations, I doubt those who rushed to book will demand their money back (though ticket prices at the NT are getting steep enough to trigger an urgent debate). Yet I can’t help feeling that – presented this year, this autumn, this week, when all eyes are on Westminster – the piece fails to answer the serendipitous tantalisation of its title. The country is crying out for drama that makes sense of the current crisis; the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Jennings plays a Tory MP, implicitly serving the constituency of Witney – David Cameron’s former seat. The action isn’t set in the here and now, though, but the high water mark of Eighties Thatcherism – May 1988, to be precise, in the wake of the enactment of Section 28, part of the 1988 Local Government Act that placed an obligation on local
authorities and schools not to “promote” homosexuality. As a junior minister, Jennings’s character Robin Hesketh – a middle-aged reactionary who displays a glibness about Aids that verges on odious Alan B’stard-ish caricature – voted in favour.
That chapter lies at the crux of the 90-minute drama, which has a shrewd eye for the personal ramifications of political positions, the way a tough-love ethos can have adverse consequences. A family tragedy lurks in the corners of the conversation that ensues when Hesketh comes home dog-tired to his cosy Cotswolds pile, encountering his embittered, alcoholic, Left-leaning wife Diana (Duncan), wafting about in a nightie.
Given that at the Globe in March we saw another debut from an actor-turned-writer, Tom Stuart’s After Edward, which took aim at the legacy of the legislation, it’s clear that a generation on, the shadow of the late Eighties – so rife in homophobia – is being explored. I wouldn’t deny the affecting way the subject comes to define the evening, after a slow-burn build-up worthy of the Aga cooker that nestles in Hildegard Bechtler’s capacious set. Yet for too much of the time, it’s as if we’re witnessing a footnote to a bygone era – and one scant on specifics.
True, Hesketh is, like the then incumbent of Witney, Douglas Hurd, an Old Etonian. The hint of pertinence is assisted by stinging lines from the withering Diana: “So easy to mistake an expensive education for an actual understanding of the world.” Yet that still plays to current prejudices rather than answering historical fidelity.
As the pair deliver barbs and retorts like a genteel English version of George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, you are left pondering some basics: why would this duo have stayed together for so long, and so apparently miserably? And why, given their needling garrulousness, have the conversations that long needed airing not come to a head before now?
If the script smacks too often of contrivance, it contains laugh-outloud gags and a few ping-pong match style welcome swipes at lefty smugness: “You try being a member of Margaret Thatcher’s government and standing in the foyer of a theatre,” Hesketh jeers. “If you want to talk about prejudice.”
Jennings, ramrod-backed and vaguely ruddy-cheeked, is good at suggesting a concertedly bluff attitude that’s also a lordly, controlling condescension. Duncan is so wintry that those in the front row might need a blanket – pale and aghast at the life she has saddled herself with, but open to the charge that she knew what she was getting into.
In the play’s flashes of psychological subtlety, more than its political trenchancy, lies grounds for optimism about Woods’s next move.