Causes without a rebel

One of the better plays at the National Theatre in recent weeks has been about a 21st-century banker, Judy, who quits her job to become a 1950s-style housewife. In Laura Wade’s Home, I’m Darling, Judy ditches her corporate wardrobe for a kitchen pinny and feather duster. She could have stepped from the Good Housekeeping domestic guide my mother was given after her wedding in 1954. Judy scorns modern technology and she dislikes coarse language. She is, at initial view, a faux-nostalgic figure, to be mocked. Yet the word used for her stance is ‘rebellion’ and by the end of the play she may, to a small extent, have made us re-examine today’s assumptions about work and happiness.

Judy, though slightly mad, is fresh. There hasn’t been anyone like her in recent drama. A grim orthodoxy has descended on the modern stage. Its characters largely eff and blind, marinaded in metropolitan sarcasm. They are as predictable as were the characters found in British drawing-room plays in the mid-20th century — until John Osborne’s angry young men brought revolution in the 1950s.

It would be excessive to call Laura Wade’s gently satirical play revolutionary but it certainly shows a character who dares to be different and question modern manners. There is a lesson here for Westminster politicians. Although MPs and party strategists often endorse ‘change’ as an electoral slogan, few behave in a way that is remotely rebellious. God, they’re dreary.

One of the more boring things they do is speak up against long-defeated problems. They ‘boldly’ embrace anti-racism. With quivering lips they assert belief in equal pay, horror at female genital mutilation, indignation at sexual abuse. The electorate thinks, ‘Well, yes, of course, we know that’ — and concludes these politicians have nothing new to offer.