UK Edition
Why political playwrights have never had it so good
When I started work on my first play – An Honourable Man, a political drama set in the near future – I never dared to hope it might receive a full professional production. To my delight and astonishment, however, my seemingly quixotic gesture is now responsible for six superb actors performing the piece in a returns-only run at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington, under the guidance of a brilliant young director, Jolley Gosnold.
Getting this far has taken much hard work and no small amount of luck, but another vital factor has been the seemingly insatiable appetite just now for political theatre. The roots of that are not hard to identify.
On our opening day alone, a minister resigned and the Government was fighting for its life in the House of Commons; and that was just Tuesday. The timing may have seemed serendipitous, but in almost any other week during the current parliamentary calendar, the real-life political dramas at Westminster would surely have buttressed and echoed our work in a similar manner.
Life and art are somehow melding into a single dramatic narrative of knife-edge parliamentary votes, personal rancour and rash talk of realignment. The demand for political theatre may be overwhelming, but the supply of it is surprisingly limited and I think I am possibly the first political “insider” to write a political drama since former Labour whip Joe Ashton tried his hand with “Majority of One” 30 years ago.
If those of us with first-hand political experience are failing to sate this new-found fascination with political drama, one sublimely fine piece of writing demonstrates how to bring politics to life on a stage: This House by James Graham, which brilliantly, hilariously and, ultimately, movingly, portrays the human and dramatic side of the 1974-1979 Parliament, as Labour loses first its majority, then its leader, and then, gradually, its authority.
Through a fog of cynicism and near-constant invective, we observe the grimy engine rooms of politics in all their flawed glory, sustained, barely, by gallows humour and weary idealism.
In many respect the strengths of Graham’s writing are conventional: snappy, believable dialogue, high drama leavened with rough humour, the personal balanced against the national. This House also plays perfectly to the audience demographic: Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and the Winter of Discontent are abiding, possibly formative, memories for many of today’s theatre-goers.
Another masterstroke was to exclude the leading figures of the day from the stage, focusing instead on the men (and woman – Ann Taylor) of the Whips’ Offices, as they negotiate their way through dire parliamentary arithmetic, whilst also providing bewitching cameos for then-future volcanoes such as Michael Heseltine and Norman St John Stevas.
It strikes me that This House is both symptom and cause of the recent revival in political interest and theatre. The serendipitous timing of the play, arriving on the scene just as the country elected its first hung Parliament since 1974, certainly helped. Not only did that make the scenario strangely relevant and suddenly comprehensible and contemporary: the general election of 2010 also inaugurated an unusually heated period in our national, political life.
There has been a spate of “Brexit plays” and I didn’t want to add to that. I am much more interested in what was behind the vote for Brexit and why, for instance, 85 per cent of Tories voted “remain” in 1975, but only half that proportion did the same in 2016. This is, in my view, too little discussed. Millions of voters evidently believe they have had their inheritance as a nation tainted or denied to them and took a chance on Brexit as a means of alerting the political establishment to their deeply-felt sense of discontent.
If theatre is to have any useful purpose, it must be a safe place for discussing dangerous questions, so a play on the subject of culture, immigration and populism began to take shape in my mind. My play’s premise, that a Labour MP might respond to deselection by “going rogue” and setting up his own, aggressively populist political movement, may have seemed fanciful when I began my work, less than three years ago. Now, perhaps, we are staging the piece just in time to prevent life overtaking art.
To some extent, all theatre is political, and there have certainly always been political playwrights. If theatre serves any purpose, other than to entertain, then it must shine light upon the human condition. Every decision I make as a writer, and every decision the director makes, is by its connate nature subjective. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we seek to induce the audience to see the world through our eyes, through the prism of our perceptions and belief systems.
My politics and those of the director are very different. I am a former Conservative candidate and he is a Labour activist, but our creative relationship could work only if I gave him his head. He and his cast have duly recreated my play in their own image; and I love it. That is the essence of theatre and it is pure politics.
I have been politically active for three decades for one, simple reason: because I believe politics can indeed change people’s lives for the better; that politicians can make a difference. This flirtation of mine with theatre has persuaded me, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that theatre can do the same.
An Honourable Man runs at the White Bear Theatre, 138 Kennington Park Road, London SE11 4DJ, from 12-16 June