In a recent newspaper op-ed piece, David Hare lamented that the current British Labour Party lacks a compelling political narrative. Ironically, his own last compelling dramatic narrative, over 20 years old now, is owed to the Labour Party. Hare has always been adamant that The Absence Of War was inspired by attitudes, rather than based on actual persons and events, that he saw when embedded with Labour for research purposes during the 1992 general election campaign. Nevertheless, the pathological caution and insecurity he portrays – the overriding imperative of doing nothing wrong rather than showing any identifiable positive qualities – is now familiar to observers of numerous political parties the world over.

Jeremy Herrin’s touring revival for Headlong, which has opened in Sheffield, cannot but be conscious how much further down that path we have travelled since. Media-timid circumscription now seems so natural that Reece Dinsdale provides insufficient contrast between fictitious Labour leader George Jones’s on- and off-agenda episodes, even when Jones dries whilst making an unscripted rally speech. (Or perhaps we have simply grown used to seeing oratorically incompetent politicos.) His election-night remarks of defeat to his personal aides, “Let’s all just be Tories”, no longer sound despairing (this is, after all, the strategy by which Tony Blair took Labour back into power in 1997), but almost exuberant, demob-happy as it were. Cyril Nri as political adviser Oliver Dix shoots his loyalty through with a blunt cynicism which is now the familiar stuff of “behind-the-scenes” political screen satires. Too many audience laughs are born of bleak familiarity. But that is to criticise the world beyond, rather than within, the play. There is still much here that is both relevant and trenchant, and Herrin and his cast (also notably including James Harkness as a loyal political minder and Charlotte Lucas as a publicity adviser) work the evening with pace and commitment.

Life partly imitates art, too. Partly. George Jones is shown as being a lover of theatre and as representing a Sheffield constituency. Both these factors are also true of current Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. I didn’t see him at the theatre on opening night.
    
Written for the Financial Times.