Westminster playground

Wow. This is a turn-up. Politicians and actors rarely see eye-to-eye. Thesps regard Westminster as sordid, petty, corrupt and corrupting. Politicians, for their part, like to dismiss the theatre as pretentious, irrelevant and fake. So here’s a play that brings them together. This House, written by James Graham, and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a triumph on many levels. It takes the most squalid and depressing era in recent political history —1974–1979 — and turns it into a frothy and hilarious melodrama.

James Graham’s inspirational idea is to use Labour’s fragile majority as his sole dramatic motor. We’re in the whips’ office and we watch Harold Wilson’s backroom boys as they scramble to keep the government in place while their Tory opponents, across the corridor, are plotting and scheming to trigger a no-confidence motion. This reduces the sprawling action to a single imperative and gives the play a wonderfully narrow and compelling focus.