There is no shortage of grounds on which you might dislike Hope. You could find it too explicitly partisan, especially for a publicly funded theatre, dealing as it does with a Labour town council’s response to yet another round of Westminster-imposed budget cutting. (Or you might admire the Royal Court’s directness in addressing a subject head-on which the actual political parties all tend to skirt around, namely the practice and ultimate morality of such cuts.) Alternatively, from the left, you might consider its ending a timid cop-out, sidestepping from the main plot to a human interaction that’s a bit too obvious in justifying the title. (Or you might ask, well, where else could it practicably have gone at that stage, and isn’t the whole point that this is about people?)
    
You might find playwright Jack Thorne too programmatic in his portrayal of the broad community: one councillor’s elderly father, another’s teenage son, a token Muslim or two and a beneficiary of the day centre for those with learning disabilities. (Or you might laud the performance of Jo Eastwood, an actor with Down’s syndrome, and note that Tommy Knight as Jake is another in Thorne’s series of superbly written smartarse teens.) Perhaps most crucially, you may find it deficient as theatre, being all “tell” and virtually no “show”. (Or you might find it every bit as engaged as David Edgar’s now alas unfashionable plays blending human and civic dramas.)
    
What transcends all such disputes is that John Tiffany’s production contains uniformly stellar acting. After Tom Georgeson’s major (though not “big”) scene as an Old Labour councillor now gone maverick in his old age, I wanted to leap to my feet in ovation, but within a couple of minutes I had realised that no-one else onstage is more than a nose behind him. Paul Higgins as the conflicted deputy leader discovering what it means to want to do right, Stella Gonet as the inflexible leader (still partly channelling Margaret Thatcher from Gonet’s recent West End run in Handbagged), Christine Entwisle, Rudi Dharmalingam, Sharon Duncan-Brewster… everyone gets under the living skin of their character. And that’s far more important in the theatre than political box-ticking.
     
Written for the Financial Times.