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.