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.