Funny, short and cheap to stage, Hansard is an excellent bet for a transfer

Hansard is the debut play by actor Simon Woods, who enjoys a deep knowledge of his subject. The characters are a middle-aged couple, the Heskeths, who occupy
‘a country house in Oxfordshire. Georgian. Good bones. Not large’. The year is 1988 and Robin is a busy Tory MP whose wife Diana has realised that she loathes the Conservative party and all its doings. ‘They talk a good game,’ she says, ‘but they’re unbelievably dangerous.’ As a lifelong leftie, she has even started begging strangers to vote against her husband, whose policies ‘inflict damage on the most vulnerable in society’. She also suspects him of philandering and has taken to appearing unannounced at his London flat.

Robin shares his wife’s talent for invective. To start with his insults are affectionate. ‘They don’t think you’re left-wing, darling, they think you’re highly strung.’ Later he gets unpleasant. He asks if her daily workload involves anything more than ‘moving the cushions around on the sofa’. And he dismisses her needy sexual advances as a symptom of Alzheimer’s. ‘First you left that courgette in the knife drawer, and now this.’ He blames her lustiness on drink. ‘Your allure smells like a marquee on the morning after a wedding.’

This is vicious stuff but the delivery is feather-light and charming. Perhaps the writer intended to portray Robin as a sadistic Tory ogre but Alex Jennings gives his cruel barbs an innocuous, even sophisticated playfulness. And Diana (Lindsay Duncan) seems oddly content to endure his put-downs and even to encourage them.

Those who recall the 1980s will recognise that the period dialogue is almost faultless. People of Robin’s age liked to call Princess Diana ‘Lady Di’ — a label coined by the tabloids when she first emerged as Prince Charles’s girlfriend.