Theatre review: Hansard

It can’t be the easiest time in history to be a political playwright; the audience could be walking into the theatre at 7:15 ready for an urgently topical exploration of the current state of affairs, but the play doesn’t start until 7:30 by which point the whole thing’s hopelessly dated. Better, as actor-turned-playwright Simon Woods does, to go for a very specific political event in the past and (apart from the obligatory deliberate winks to topical issues) let the audience draw their own parallels. Hansard takes us to 1988, the weekend after the passing of Section 28 (which banned “the promotion of homosexuality [and] pretended family relationships” in schools,) as Conservative back-bencher Robin Hesketh (Alex Jennings) returns to his home in the Cotswolds. His wife Diana (Lindsay Duncan) is waiting for him looking dishevelled, at the very least hungover from the night before if not already a few drinks the worse for wear this morning.

Cue a passive-aggressive argument as he snipes at her for her drinking, and she hits back with accusations that he’s been cheating which, for reasons she’s not ready to reveal just yet, she’s had particular cause to suspect this week. There’s something much darker troubling her though as the argument gets nastier.

The first hour or so of the play is entertaining enough, in a watered-down Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? way, but largely disappointing. Politically the pair have always been mismatched, as Diana is comparatively liberal, and while their marriage was still functioning she played the part of the dutiful political wife and supported Robin, but since their relationship started to go downhill she’s been actively dissuading people from voting for him. It amounts to one of my pet hates – a political play that contrives its story around making its characters confront each other with a pretty straightforward argument of their opposing views. In this case, the overwhelming theme is of the Tories creating enemies for the electorate to fear and hate – usually out of the most vulnerable in society – and promise to deal with the fictional threat as a way to gain votes. Robin tries to argue the case that he genuinely believes he’s protecting children, but easily lets slip that it’s essentially about not challenging the majority’s bigotry so that they’ll continue to vote for him.

The other pet hate Hansard brings up is of a play that drops hints to its plot twist too unsubtly and too early: Between the offhand mentions of a son who’s only ever referred to in the past tense, and Section 28 being the thing that’s finally brought things to a head between them, I felt I was generally about half an hour ahead of the plot most of the time. It’s when the play finally catches up with itself in the last half-hour that it really comes to life as it deals with the emotional heart of the story and the human cost of the vote-grabbing policies and hate rhetoric Robin is so quick to defend. Although Robin is what I would call a comparatively sympathetic portrait considering he’s a Tory politician in awe of Thatcher, even as he has to face up to the emotions he’s buried there’s no question this is a man who, if not incapable of empathy, finds it easy to suppress even when his own experience should scream the wrongness of what he’s endorsing.

All I really know about Woods himself is that after a few high-profile relationships with female co-stars he married a man, so you can see where a policy expressly aimed at making young LGBTQ people suppress that side of themselves would be highly personal to him, and it shows in the way the play turns up a notch. Simon Godwin’s sensitive production helps paper over any cracks, with a typically hyper-realistic Hildegard Bechtler set providing a symbolic backdrop – a vast country house that looks palatial but, on closer inspection, is grubby and in some disrepair – and Duncan and Jennings give charged, emotional performances. If the writing’s occasional clumsiness meant the show didn’t quite emotionally engage me it’s only fair to say it was a very different experience for Jim, who found a huge emotional impact in how successfully the story took him back to a dark time in British queer history. For me, it feels like the story was rushed to the stage a bit, but with homophobes once again in the news for attempting gay erasure in the name of protecting children, maybe it’s only fair not to waste time bringing up the lessons of the past.

Hansard by Simon Woods is booking in repertory until the 25th of November at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Catherine Ashmore.