Wow. This is a turn-up. Politicians and actors rarely see eye-to-eye. Thesps regard Westminster as sordid, petty, corrupt and corrupting. Politicians, for their part, like to dismiss the theatre as pretentious, irrelevant and fake. So here’s a play that brings them together. This House, written by James Graham, and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a triumph on many levels. It takes the most squalid and depressing era in recent political history —1974–1979 — and turns it into a frothy and hilarious melodrama.
James Graham’s inspirational idea is to use Labour’s fragile majority as his sole dramatic motor. We’re in the whips’ office and we watch Harold Wilson’s backroom boys as they scramble to keep the government in place while their Tory opponents, across the corridor, are plotting and scheming to trigger a no-confidence motion. This reduces the sprawling action to a single imperative and gives the play a wonderfully narrow and compelling focus. The drama unfolds in a series of quick-fire sketches that are full of beautifully observed details. There are gags aplenty, too. A Tory backwoodsman predicts victory for Ted Heath in February 1974. ‘In dark times,’ he pontificates, ‘the electorate always turns to the existing government.’ ‘They’re only dark,’ scoffs his Labour opponent, ‘because you can’t switch the lights on.’ Another MP jokes that parliamentary democracy is ‘more or less the only thing Britain has designed and exported that hasn’t been sent back’.
The portrait of a government teetering perpetually on the brink of collapse is extremely seedy and peculiarly exhilarating. Last-minute deals are done with intransigent Ulstermen in dingy pubs. Ailing grandees are wheeled into the lobbies in oxygen masks. RAF jets are scrambled to bring holidaying ministers home from sun-kissed beaches. The whips even keep a special screwdriver on hand to unlock gin-soaked members from inside the Gents.
The play preserves authenticity even at the cost of clarity. The whips always refer to MPs by the titles of their constituencies, not by their surnames, so when Harold Wilson resigns in 1976 his likely replacements are listed as follows: Ebbw Vale, Cardiff, Bristol South-East. It would take a super-wonk to know that this trio refers to Michael Foot, James Callaghan and Tony Benn. (I had to look two of them up.) But I loved the play for its refusal to carry passengers or to explain details to slowcoaches.
Brilliant cameos and glorious snippets of comedy abound. Matthew Pidgeon does a great turn as a hand-on-hip Norman St John-Stevas who virtually melts into his trousers when he hears of his promotion to the cabinet. Julian Wadham offers an immaculate vision of the charming and unflappable Humphrey Atkins. Andrew Havill is wonderfully batty, yet completely believable, as the fraudster John Stonehouse. He delivers an amazingly barmy speech to a bemused whip about the relative terrors of shore lines and seas. Shorelines, muses Stonehouse, are scarier because they stand for the end of life whereas seas are calming and welcoming because they represent the hereafter. A few months later, he fakes his own death by dumping his clothes at the water’s edge in Miami and absconding to Australia. This isn’t just hilariously funny, it also offers a genuine insight into Stonehouse’s weird state of mind.
The show’s undoubted star is Charles Edwards who plays the suave and cunning Tory whip, Jack Weatherill. Despite being as handsome as Nigel Havers, Edwards is as naturally funny as Norman Wisdom and he can find a laugh where neither the script, nor the situation, appear to suggest it. He’s more than a gold prospector. He’s a gold mine. Invaluable to any cast. This, for me, is the show of the year. Parliament will empty as soon as the word spreads that the National has produced an adult play about the gloriously childish Westminster playground.
American Idiot is a slick and entertaining musical by indie rock band Green Day. Their best-known songs follow a two-part pattern. You get a sweet, folksy opening hook which goes round in circles for a couple of minutes. Then, with a thunderclap of drums and a monsoon-blast of guitars, you get a frenzied heavy-metal anthem-y section that goes around in a few more circles and leads back to the sweet, folksy opening hook. American Idiot is trotting around the UK on a major tour and the producers hired a charming PR man to ferry a gang of hacks to Southampton’s fabulous Mayflower theatre for the première. I found it diverting rather than captivating. Mind you, I’m way outside its target range. To get the most from this show, you need to be an angry but sensitive kid wired to the eyeballs on every drug known to man. Happily, that includes most of teenage Britain. I predict a smash.
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