Labour of Love
A Play by James Graham @ Noël Coward Theatre, 16th November, 2017
If NEC, LGC, GMC, AMM, LCF, EC, and a score of other acronyms are second nature to you then this is a “must see” play about life in the Labour Party. I went with 20 other addicts from Battersea and Tooting and got a powerful shot of nostalgia, regret and sentimentality. James Graham, who specialises in political drama, is clearly equally captivated by the intimate dynamics of personal pyscho-drama.
The action covers the rise and fall of Blairism in the Labour Party in the period from the fall of Thatcher in 1990 to the “triumph” of Corbynism in June, 2017. Martin Freeman, as David Lyons, is the spirit of Tony Blair and Tamsin Greig, as Jean Whittaker, represents the heart and soul of the party.
Their failures and triumphs are first plotted backwards from the failure/triumph (as in Dunkirk) of the June, 2017, General Election. It opens with Lyons awaiting his inevitable defeat in a Midland heartland seat, which along with defeats in Stoke and Mansfield, represented the nadir of the early morning of 9th June. Here there is a good laugh for Battersea locals, I suspect Tories as well as Labour, as Lyons humorously contrasts his fate with Labour in Battersea and Leamington.
From here, the action takes us back, step by step, from election to election; from the disaster of 2010 to the triumphs of 2005, 2001 and 1997 to the hubris of 1992. The action, as the play goes into reverse concentrates, on the triumph of Blairite modernism from bringing in new technology to the constituency office to the replacement of the coalmines with call centres.
There are plenty of good jokes on the way and not a little personal drama. Lyons’ wife Elizabeth, just too-too Cherie-like, shows appropriate metropolitan disdain for both his constituency office and the local party activists. Whilst the CLP (see what I mean! For the uninitiated I mean Constituency Labour Party) organiser/agent, Whittaker, is dismissive and disparaging of both the new MP’s and his wife’s metropolitan ways and affectations.
At the interlude, it was clear that the second act was going to change into forward gear and replay the history but why and to what purpose? By the end of the play, I was only left to admire how Graham had created and used this temporal structure to show the different sides of personal dramas, political imperatives and technical gismos.
As the curtain fell, I was left to ponder the vagaries of political certainties; of how yesterday’s truths become today’s old lies and presumably how today’s certainties are as likely to be just as vulnerable to the ravages of time. Time had been just as harsh, as it happened, on new technologies as on new labour, with the fax machine and the tele-text as redundant as any New Labour nostrum. But the play also demonstrated how time and the intense pressures of political lives can be just as damaging for many personal relationships.
The question remained: how were the personal dramas, Lyons and his wife and more particularly Whittaker and her two husbands, going to be played out? As it turns out, of course, the denouement could be divined within the action, both in reverse gear and in forward gear. Along with another message, deeply embedded in the play and that was a successful Labour Party needs both the “winners” and the “dreamers”.
James Graham has given us another clever and witty play for political nuts of all persuasions, not just those of a left-wing bent.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 