James Graham has lately joined the Simon Stephens Premiership of playwrights who are not simply prolific but virtually ubiquitous. The strange thing about Graham is that he’s a politics geek, in the ungeekiest sense. This House, his play about the Westminster whips’ offices during the 1974-79 government, is now on tour following National Theatre and West End runs; with Labour Of Love he turns his attention to the Labour Party since the last days of Thatcherism – its perennial tug-of-war between principled but cultish socialism and electorally popular but often toothless compromise.

In order to address this matter, he has this time invented an altogether fictitious narrative set in a fictitious East Midlands constituency (though not dissimilar to the actual seat of Bassetlaw). We first see Labour MP David Lyons probably about to lose his seat on election night 2017; subsequent scenes run backwards to his arrival in 1990, parachuted in as a centrist candidate to succeed an old-school socialist in a by-election, then after the interval the timeline runs back forwards to the almost-present day again.

It’s a clever structuring, letting us see that there was never a golden age when Labour’s path and purpose were clear and unambiguous. There was always grind, always compromise, personal and factional conflict: the sea-change of Blairism in the 1990s and return to socialist vision under Jeremy Corbyn since... well, since this June in particular... have been high-water marks of such tensions but far from isolated instances of them. Just as cannily, Graham weaves in a rom-com dimension between the MP and his constituency agent and right-hand woman Jean Whittaker; ending on this aspect rather than the political one is a cop-out, of course, but it’s an obviously justified one. In this instance at least, it’s not cowardly to avoid taking a position.

Jeremy Herrin’s production for his Headlong company in partnership with Michael Grandage’s outfit is as masterly as ever, right down to its choice of sourced music. Martin Freeman and Tamsin Greig as the central couple show off their funny bones without attenuating the sometimes intense political argument. And Graham goes almost straight into rehearsals of his next play, about a high-profile cheating case on TV quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Written for the Financial Times.