“Nothing extraordinary ever happens,”
remarks one character in James Graham’s play. How wrong can you get?
Not only has the British general election just past yielded remarkable
results due, paradoxically, to its very dullness, but the polling
station in which Graham sets his play sees matters gradually snowball
from a single misplaced vote into an avalanche of personation and
serious consequences. Yet his tale is entirely devoid of malice; it is
simply a matter of one fib begetting two bigger ones, and so on.
The Vote is suffused with the
fascination that informed Graham’s National Theatre piece
This House, about the 1974-79
government, but was largely lacking from
Coalition, his recent TV drama
about the negotiations after the 2010 election: namely, that he is
engaged, and engages us, with both the rocks of procedural detail and
the multi-legged ridiculousness scurrying about underneath. Basically,
he makes geekery fun. All kinds of musts and must-nots are raised, but
they never begin to bog down the goings-on amongst the station staff:
Nina Sosanya as the earnest one, Mark Gatiss in prime officious-twerp
mode, and Catherine Tate as the one who can’t put a foot right. They
are supported by a starry cameo cast of 40 or so as assorted voters,
officials, police and staff, from Timothy West as a confused old geezer
to Paul Chahidi as a single-issue fringe candidate. You could see Judi
Dench positively shimmying into a voting booth, MyAnna Buring as a
Swedish reporter and Bill Paterson as an irascible janitor of the
school in which the polling station is set up, and heard the terrific
line from a first-time voter into her iPhone, “Siri, who should I vote
for?”
By now, though, you’ve missed your chance; this remarkable project from
Graham and Donmar director Josie Rourke has ended its theatrical run
(no point in continuing as bigger political dramas unfold) with a live
television broadcast on More4 at the very time at which it is set: the
final 90 minutes of Thursday’s polling. It was a deliciously smart way
of addressing the importance of the event without getting caught up in
the actual issues, and a much livelier strategy than the politicos
themselves ever managed to find during the campaign.
Written for the Financial
Times.