Change of tack
Lloyd Evans
Gethsemane Cottesloe state of Emergency Gate
There’s a massive hole in the middle of David Hare’s new play. It’s called Iraq. What an issue that was. What a best-seller. Talk about box-office. For two or three years it seemed that Hare had singlehandedly won the Iraq war but his victory proved tenuous and short-lived. Once the killing tailed off and the issue slithered down the news agenda, he was left without his worldwide smash-hit subject. A terrible loss. In Stuff Happens and The Vertical Hour, the Iraq issue set Hare’s mind ablaze and he produced thrilling bursts of political analysis and polemic. Now he turns his attention to the candyfloss topic of party funding, which he tries to invest with some moral density by attaching it, rather clumsily, to a family crisis in the Cabinet.
The female Home Secretary (beautifully played by Tamsin Greig) learns that her bolshie teenage daughter has a dope habit. Actually, that’s not a crisis but an opportunity. A deftly worded plea for understanding would make the Home Secretary seem touchingly human and would enhance her public reputation. Hare ignores this and creates an improbable scenario in which Labour’s chief fund-raiser (a gay weirdo called Otto played with great charm by Stanley Townsend) embroils himself in the scandal by buying the silence of the girl’s head-teacher with the offer of ‘a new gym’. (Mind you, it’s a private school so why does it need a new gym? The plot is riddled with such non-sequiturs.) While the funding scandal rumbles on the PM calls in the Home Secretary for a heart-to-heart about her businessman husband whose questionable dealings overseas are about to embroil the party in damaging headlines.
As you can see, the plot is both elaborate and threadbare, its sources rustled together like lukewarm bubble-and-squeak from the professional and domestic travails of Jack Straw, Tessa Jowell and Lord Levy. Hare’s portrait of the PM is especially spineless and perfunctory. Anthony Calf does his best to inject some humanity into this pantomime baddie who worships power, money and God — in that order — and compels his Home Secretary to detonate her marriage in order to spare the government’s blushes. Instead of strumming a guitar the PM has a drum-kit which he whacks petulantly when conversations become embarrassing.
At all levels, Hare’s portraiture is rigid and formulaic. Labour’s high command are shown as corrupt, devious cowards and its grass-roots supporters as high-minded truth-telling saints who are inexplicably powerless to defy the bosses they hate. Instead they bleat and bellyache about their predicament. There’s enough self-pity in this play to fill the Grand Canyon. A highly paid newspaper hack, on the brink of tears, announces how deeply he regrets writing for the tabloids and wishes he hadn’t given up his dazzling former career (and I’m not making this up) as the author of academic theses on medieval trench-building techniques. A minor Labour fund-raiser has a three-hanky moment in which he whines that the party’s moral failings have drained his marriage of romance. And a drippy music teacher whinges that Whitehall tinkering has destroyed her profession and forced her (and I’m not making this up either) to become a busker on the underground.
Two possibilities suggest themselves. Either Hare’s snapshot of the Labour party is wildly inaccurate and the play is intellectually bankrupt. Or it’s spot on, in which case Hare and his supporters need to explain how they let their beloved movement fall into the hands of a gang of lightweights and hypocrites. If the party is as susceptible to being usurped by silver-tongued play-actors as Hare suggests, why isn’t he in Number 10 himself?
State of Emergency, at the Gate, is a beautiful chore. German playwright Falk Richter invites us into a mysterious community whose luxury apartments are haunted at night by the howls of desperados clamouring for admission. The residents live in a state of gilt-edged terror, never able to enjoy their five-star surroundings for fear that some professional or social blunder will cost them their place among the élite. Naomi Dawson’s design is a gorgeous elongated sitting room sealed from the audience with a wall of glass which creates an eerie fish-bowl effect. Handsomely costumed Geraldine Alexander is slinkily effective as the unstable wife whose husband is threatened by falling sales at work and a worrying tendency to fall asleep in mid-conversation. A shame that so much talent and artistry has been wasted on a waffling, pompous, melodramatic and guilt-drenched slice of Europaranoia. This is an exceptionally lovely and exceptionally painful thing to watch, like a supermodel in a barbed-wire bikini. ❑
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