I DON’T often go to the theatre, so I suppose it’s just my bad luck that two out of the four plays I’ve seen in recent years at the National Theatre have been complete stinkers. The turkeys, for the record, were David Edgar’s Playing With Fire and David Hare’s Gethsemane (to be reviewed on the Tribune website’s arts section on Wednesday 26 November – Ed.), which I saw last week in the Cottesloe.
Sometimes it’s hard to pin down exactly what’s wrong with a bad play. For instance, you can’t really criticise it for being unrealistic, because that’s not the point of drama. From Ibsen to Mamma Mia, the purpose of theatre is to distort reality to different degrees, rendering it either hyper-real or veering away from reality altogether. But perhaps (and although I’m no expert, we all tend to have a feel for these things) the tipping point between being a good or a bad play is believability. This is not simply about an ability or otherwise to suspend disbelief, because there’s an entire and venerable tradition of theatre which expects its audience to be aware that they’re part of an often almost ritualised exercise in artificiality, rather than watching a genuine slice of real life. Nor does credibility enter this equation. I’ll pay good money to see all sorts of incredible things, just like anyone else.
But there’s incredible and then there’s incredible. Hare and Edgar have long been heralded as our two leading and best radical playwrights. Oscillating finely for decades between Bertholt Brecht and Bernard Shaw across the spectrum of political theatre, what’s finally scuppered them in their latest plays is “new” Labour. Edgar’s Playing With Fire was meant to be an exploration of the crisis between “new” Labour, “old” Labour and multiculturalism, inspired by the Bradford, Burnley and Oldham riots of 2001. His aims were entirely laudable, but as I watched it in the Olivier, it was increasingly obvious that Edgar had a completely tin ear for the nuances of how “new” Labour operates. His central character, a female spin-doctor, was a caricature – which is fine – but an unrecognisable one.
It’s also fine, in Hare’s Gethsemane, to write dialogue which has never issued from human lips for characters caught up in events which almost but never quite happened. But although Gethsemane is a very, very thinly-veiled portrayal of Blair’s dalliance with shadowy fundraisers, none of it rang true. So we get a drum playing Prime Minister, a female Home Secretary with a drug-taking daughter who gets raped by a populist historian/journalist, a sinister Jewish fundraiser and a heroine who abandons teaching because she can’t stand the bureaucracy and so finds redemption and purity by becoming a busker. Oh, and I forgot about the sinister Jewish fundraiser’s oily gay factotum who provides the comic relief. Which, once more, is fine, except the characters are insufficiently caricatured for it to be satire, or realistic enough to be believable if it’s not satire.
And, come to think of it, it’s not fine at all for a famously radical playwright such as David Hare (forgive me – Sir David Hare, courtesy of Tony Blair) to give us a big, bad, Machievellianly charming bearded Jew as a baddie, or a camp poof for laughs. But even if you can forgive him that, this exploration of the compromises and corruptions that beset Blair’s “new” Labour still misses its target.
Hare fails to recognise the real problem with Blair because, like Gethsemane, Hare is one of the symptoms rather than part of the diagnosis. Because Blair, like Hare, is essentially a luvvie. Strip aside either the statesmanship or the agitprop, and what you’ll see is two people enchanted by a world of make-believe, caked in slap against a badly painted backdrop, with both pretending it’s reality. Certainly, Lord Levy may have played Mephistopheles to Blair’s Faust by introducing him to all those rich and glamorous people, but a far more interesting and insightful drama would have explored the fact that Britain’s Prime Minister, despite his power, was and is as star-struck as a stage-door johnny.
In an article about public relations man Matthew Freud in last week’s Guardian (the paper gave Gethsemane four stars, by the way), John Harris wrote: “For Blair, apparently, part of the attraction of the Freud-Murdoch milieu is simple: ‘He just loves hanging out with celebs’.” Which explains a great deal, including all those hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis: be it Bono or George Bush, Blair is a classic starfucker.
Theatre, as I’ve said, isn’t real, but is based on the delicious pretence that it is. But like anything else, the spell can be broken in an instant if you’re not careful. Hare is terminally disenchanted with Tony Blair, but hasn’t returned the knighthood Blair bestowed on him back in the salad days of 1998. Perhaps that explains why political playwrights who are meant to have their fingers on the national political pulse end up only fingering the vein throbbing on their own temple.
