Time Out London- 10th October 2012
Take your seat on the green benches: the fun is about to begin. It is 1974 and Ted Heath's Conservative government is on the way out – although not very far out, as it happens, since Labour don't win a majority in the election.
Responsibility for hanging on to power or wresting it back lies – in James Graham's new play anyway – with the whips, plotting and conniving in poky offices as if the British government were a confederacy of schoolboys trying to wriggle out of doing their homework.
Which is pretty much Graham's view of them. ('It was a mistake to let us sit together so we could pass notes,' is one Labour whip's summary of the Heath government's fall.) There are good – if often puerile – jokes in Jeremy Herrin's bright, pacy production, as well as odd bursts of song, rather like morning hymns, and a rock band on the balcony of Rae Smith's wonderful set (the Cottesloe is now the House of Commons).
The attitude, meanwhile, is glum nostalgia. These MPs are overgrown children with a dim sense that the world is changing around them; the pervading feeling is that neither plebs nor 'aristotwats' will much like the outcome of this hung parliament (and so it proved).
As the boys in natty blue, Julian Wadham and Charles Edwards rebuff the old notion that the Tories, the cream of Britain, were rich, thick and full of clots; the portly Labour whips, wheezing coaldust and swearing blind between apologies to the token woman, are well served by Vincent Franklin, Andrew Frame (standing in for original star Phil Daniels, who has temporarily left the production after a bereavement) and particularly, Philip Glenister, as a bruiser-ish fixer extraordinaire.
If these sound like stereotypes, so they are, but then, MPs function as representatives, so maybe that's appropriate. There's little to learn here but there is a lot to watch, not least the working paradox of a democratic system based on a bunch of hoary traditions, in which even an ex-miner and a toff have more in common than either will with the grocer's daughter about to pick the whole place up and rattle it till the pips squeak.
Responsibility for hanging on to power or wresting it back lies – in James Graham's new play anyway – with the whips, plotting and conniving in poky offices as if the British government were a confederacy of schoolboys trying to wriggle out of doing their homework.
Which is pretty much Graham's view of them. ('It was a mistake to let us sit together so we could pass notes,' is one Labour whip's summary of the Heath government's fall.) There are good – if often puerile – jokes in Jeremy Herrin's bright, pacy production, as well as odd bursts of song, rather like morning hymns, and a rock band on the balcony of Rae Smith's wonderful set (the Cottesloe is now the House of Commons).
The attitude, meanwhile, is glum nostalgia. These MPs are overgrown children with a dim sense that the world is changing around them; the pervading feeling is that neither plebs nor 'aristotwats' will much like the outcome of this hung parliament (and so it proved).
As the boys in natty blue, Julian Wadham and Charles Edwards rebuff the old notion that the Tories, the cream of Britain, were rich, thick and full of clots; the portly Labour whips, wheezing coaldust and swearing blind between apologies to the token woman, are well served by Vincent Franklin, Andrew Frame (standing in for original star Phil Daniels, who has temporarily left the production after a bereavement) and particularly, Philip Glenister, as a bruiser-ish fixer extraordinaire.
If these sound like stereotypes, so they are, but then, MPs function as representatives, so maybe that's appropriate. There's little to learn here but there is a lot to watch, not least the working paradox of a democratic system based on a bunch of hoary traditions, in which even an ex-miner and a toff have more in common than either will with the grocer's daughter about to pick the whole place up and rattle it till the pips squeak.
Original article can be found here.
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