Change of tack

Gethsemane
Cottesloe

State of Emergency
Gate

There’s a massive hole in the middle of David Hare’s new play. It’s called Iraq. What an issue that was. What a best-seller. Talk about box-office. For two or three years it seemed that Hare had single-handedly won the Iraq war but his victory proved tenuous and short-lived. Once the killing tailed off and the issue slithered down the news agenda, he was left without his worldwide smash-hit subject. A terrible loss. In Stuff Happens and The Vertical Hour, the Iraq issue set Hare’s mind ablaze and he produced thrilling bursts of political analysis and polemic. Now he turns his attention to the candyfloss topic of party funding, which he tries to invest with some moral density by attaching it, rather clumsily, to a family crisis in the Cabinet.

The female Home Secretary (beautifully played by Tamsin Greig) learns that her bolshie teenage daughter has a dope habit. Actually, that’s not a crisis but an opportunity. A deftly worded plea for understanding would make the Home Secretary seem touchingly human and would enhance her public reputation. Hare ignores this and creates an improbable scenario in which Labour’s chief fund-raiser (a gay weirdo called Otto played with great charm by Stanley Townsend) embroils himself in the scandal by buying the silence of the girl’s head-teacher with the offer of ‘a new gym’. (Mind you, it’s a private school so why does it need a new gym? The plot is riddled with such non-sequiturs.) While the funding scandal rumbles on the PM calls in the Home Secretary for a heart-to-heart about her businessman husband whose questionable dealings overseas are about to embroil the party in damaging headlines.

As you can see, the plot is both elaborate and threadbare, its sources rustled together like lukewarm bubble-and-squeak from the professional and domestic travails of Jack Straw, Tessa Jowell and Lord Levy.