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. The drama unfolds in a series of quick-fire sketches that are full of beautifully observed details. There are gags aplenty, too. A Tory backwoodsman predicts victory for Ted Heath in February 1974. ‘In dark times,’ he pontificates, ‘the electorate always turns to the existing government.’ ‘They’re only dark,’ scoffs his Labour opponent, ‘because you can’t switch the lights on.’ Another MP jokes that parliamentary democracy is ‘more or less the only thing Britain has designed and exported that hasn’t been sent back’.

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The portrait of a government teetering perpetually on the brink of collapse is extremely seedy and peculiarly exhilarating. Last-minute deals are done with intransigent Ulstermen in dingy pubs. Ailing grandees are wheeled into the lobbies in oxygen masks. RAF jets are scrambled to bring holidaying ministers home from sun-kissed beaches. The whips even keep a special screwdriver on hand to unlock gin-soaked members from inside the Gents.