LIMEHOUSE
Donmar Warehouse, London WC2

Opened 8 March, 2017
****

No beating about the bush: Steve Waters’ play is an imagined account of the 1981 meeting at which the “Gang of Four” senior Labour Party figures resolved to leave Labour and set up what would become the Social Democratic Party. However, it is obvious that this act of dramatic exhumation is taking place only because many feel Britain today to be in a similar political situation: an unpopular Tory government shredding the communitarian fabric of the nation, ineffectually opposed by an unelectable form of Labour. We get the point from a minute or so in when Dr David Owen fulminates to his wife that Labour MPs “no longer own the policies we go to the country with”; there’s no need for wife Debbie to end the play an hour and three-quarters later by addressing the audience directly about the parallels.

As drama, Waters has a rich mix to work with. The ever-excellent Tom Goodman-Hill is clean-shaven for the first time in an age as Owen, fierily trying to railroad his colleagues into following the path he has already decided; he is matched by Roger Allam, relishing the near-caricature of Roy Jenkins, one of the greatest Prime Ministers we never had but saddled by epicurean tastes, verbosity and a speech impediment, so that here he declines coffee with “I am weplete in terms of caffeinated wefweshment.” Debra Gillett as Shirley Williams heroically combats the flying testosterone and shows her gift for couching ideological matters in human terms; Paul Chahidi as Bill Rodgers, the least prominent of the Four, is largely and self-consciously the butt of humour, but is also given the speech which most cogently crystallises the Gang’s dilemma: how can they know what it is that they are going to, and what will be the political and human cost of their leaving Labour? Nathalie Armin as Debbie Owen is the unobtrusive glue that holds matters together through a fraught day.

Polly Findlay’s production is deft but unshowy, letting the talking do the talking as it were. What’s left unspoken is also significant: that lefty Labour now has more than twice as many party members as it did in 1981, while its MPs are well to the right of the SDP, and that the SDP itself lasted less than seven years. And it is apparently inconceivable that four such devoted Labour figures (for the split was undertaken with much sorrow) might at some point, even in passing, mention socialism.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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