‘I try to interpret the most generous version of somebody’s actions,’ says the dramatist James Graham. This rare ability to create open and sympathetic characters has turned the 36-year-old into our foremost political playwright. His breakthrough work, This House, chronicled the terminal decline of James Callaghan’s premiership between 1976 and 1979. Rather than focusing on Callaghan and his destroyer, Margaret Thatcher, the play looked at the backbenchers and party whips who laboured behind the scenes to keep Callaghan’s government afloat.
Graham’s plays are comedic but he’s principally an observer rather than a satirist. Yet he recognises the value of caricature. ‘It’s a very necessary weapon with which to hold people to account,’ he says. ‘It’s something the British are uniquely placed to do. Our sense of humour is very piss-takey. I was surprised, when I went to America to work, that the first thing people observed about me was that my way of expressing affection was by insulting people. I didn’t realise that was a uniquely English thing.’
In 2017 Graham was invited by Channel 4’s new director of programmes, Ian Katz, to create a drama about the referendum. It was the first script Katz commissioned. And Graham felt qualified to encompass the spectrum of opinion on Brexit. ‘I live in Lambeth in London, in the most pro-Remain constituency in the country, but Mansfield, where my family live, is in one of the top ten pro-Leave areas. My family and friends voted Leave. I love people who voted differently from me. And I listen to them.’
Something monstrous, he says, was released into British politics by the referendum. He wanted his script ‘to make sense of this feeling that there’s a dragon in the basement that’s been growing and growing and growing for decades.
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