Sometimes a new play heralds that a great talent is emerging; at other times, it can suggest it is receding. Sadly, David Hare’s latest belongs in the latter category.
Its subject is the Labour Party —meat and drink, you would think, for Hare who for decades has held the position as this country’s most eminent political playwright. And being more skilled than any of his peers at responding to real events with plays such as Stuff Happens (about the Iraq invasion) and The Permanent Way (rail privatisation) you would think that Labour’s antisemitism crisis, Brexit, and the sheer drama of a centre left party captured by the hard left would be more than enough material with which to forge a play for our times.
Yet, instead, Hare has written something curiously out of time. His focus is fictional doctor-turned-politician Pauline (Siân Brooke) and the series of political and personal events that led her to the play’s central dilemma — will she run for the position of Labour’s first female leader.
Her opponent is former university lover Jack (Alex Hassell) whose father was a bigwig in the Labour party and who views the position of leader with more than a tinge of entitlement.
Yet Hare only briefly concerns himself with the crucial question of why Labour — the party of equality — has failed to produce a female leader. And on the issue of how a culture of conformity has gripped a party, whose most ardent activists refuse to countenance opinion that diverges from their own, well, there’s a bit of lip service paid to that issue in one conversation and one scene, but it is never explored, much less dramatised.
The sense here, which Neil Armfield’s production cannot disguise despite its muscular staging, is that Hare is relying much more on craft than content. Sentences and speeches are imbued with more significance than they actually have.
It’s a bigger problem that the play feels as if it were written well before Corbyn’s era. Jack may be steeped in the party and its culture, but he looks too Blairite to be part of the new Old Labour Party.
And when he declares with no irony that “the Labour party isn’t interested in votes,” the observation may get a few laughs, but induces at least as much eye-rolling.
Brooke invests all she can in her role. But the overall sense is like patiently listening to a great orator whose voice brings to mind great speeches of the past but who no longer has anything to say. One can only hope that Hare’s next play will see the dramatist return as the potent theatrical force we all know him to be.
