From Anthony Trollope to Meryl Streep: the theatre of politics on stage and screen

On 1 October 1950 the BBC broadcast a seemingly innocuous little play by Val Gielgud. A light-hearted and critically unremarkable political comedy, Party Manners carried a number of pointed criticisms of Labour policy, taking pot shots at egalitarianism, tax-and-spend and big government. With Clement Attlee’s party enjoying only the slimmest of parliamentary majorities and a fresh election in the offing, some BBC executives feared that Party Manners might swing the balance in the Tories’ favour. Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, chair of the BBC governors and a Labour party member, cancelled a planned repeat showing, unleashing a storm in the House of Lords.

The controversy evoked memories of 1906, when Harley Granville-Barker’s play Waste was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, owing to its unflattering portrayal of the cynicism of party politics. In both instances, upholding the moral integrity of public life was given as a reason for censorship rather than party bias: Lord Strabolgi called Party Manners ‘a violent attack, if you like by ridicule and satire… on the very essence of democracy itself’.

This sensitivity was temporary. As the precarious equilibrium of the immediate postwar years gave way to greater stability, the emergence of a more openly critical discourse would change British political culture forever. First came the progressive populism of Ealing Studios, whose films celebrated ordinary people in everyday, realistic contexts, while also dramatising their relationship with an expanding state; then the satire boom of the 1960s. Somewhere along the line, irreverence ceased to be dangerous. Democracy and its hallowed essence became fair game. By the 1980s, Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey could glibly declare that ‘Since 1832 we have been gradually excluding the voter from government,’ without fear of repercussions.

A State of Play is a trundle through a century of productions, with Granville-Barker’s Edwardian travails at one end and Meryl Streep’s big-screen portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in 2011’s The Iron Lady at the other.