That's politics

In what he obviously hopes is a provocative gesture, Peter Hall (quietly dropping the 'Sir' for the occasion) opens his company's repertory run at the Old Vic with a once-banned play. Harley Granville Barker's Waste fell foul of the Lord Chamberlain, the Times and other guardians of civic morality in 1907 and waited 29 years for its premiere. It was thoroughly rewritten in the interval; Hall has chosen to perform the 1926 text. During the same period, Granville Barker also revised his own surname, adopting a pseudo-aristocratic hyphen which has been excised from this production as thoroughly as the director's knighthood. Hall wants Waste to come across as explosive political satire, scouring the establishment which condemned it. `The play was clearly not popular in Westminster,' he writes in a depressingly smug programme note; `it is unlikely to be popular today.'

It is many times more unlikely that the bastions of privilege will lose sleep over this elegant, intellectual, delicately searching drama. Waste charts the passage of Henry Trebell (an MP who is independent in both his political affiliations and his private views) through country estates and smoke-filled chambers to a position of precarious influence in the Tory circle of the great and good. We have become so accustomed to despising our politicians that this play's Conservatives come across almost as idealists by comparison, despite their Machiavellian chicaneries. Their concern for personal honour and their pursuit of real political goals are quickly sacrificed to pragmatism, but Granville Barker's rarefied style allows them to retain their image of themselves as a superior body, men of ability and intellect. Any authentic note of satire and tragedy is left to the female characters, led by a powerful performance from Felicity Kendal as Amy O'Connell, the married woman whose affair with Trebell precipitates his downfall. For her, confronted with the choice between an illegitimate child or an illegal abortion, pragmatism is an altogether more immediate and serious problem.

Despite Hall's insistence on its power to expose political corruption and expediency, the play is at its best in dealing with subtle inflections of private morality. Granville Barker had a lifelong creative engagement with Shakespeare's work, and its influence pervades Waste, especially in the sense of where personal dilemmas overlap with public life. Ultimately, though, its Edwardian restraint prohibits the troubling, violent collapse of the boundaries between individual and state which Shakespeare dramatises. For all its provocative content abortion, disestablishment, general political murk - Waste shows influential people making their choices with almost philosophical abstraction. Michael Pennington is correspondingly well-suited to the central role, hiding Trebell's rise and fall behind a mask of imperturbable professionalism. This is a well-performed revival of an interesting play; welcome not for its relevance in an election year, nor because it forces a re-examination of the issue of censorship (on which Hall is rightly and admirably passionate), but because this sort of drama no longer exists, except perhaps in Stoppard. These days, the meditations of the political elite are surely far too banal for the stage.

One good way to find out what is being written today is the Donmar's `Four Corners' season, which presents new work from all over the British Isles. Wales is represented this year by Simon Harris's debut Badfinger, and, if forthcoming plays (by David Eldridge and Declan Hughes) prove as effective, the Donmar's initiative will have been well worth while. Badfinger never reduces itself to an essay in Welshness, but it manages nevertheless to endow its slightly predictable material -- urban depression, drugs, homelessness, psychotic moneylenders, all amid dreams of a better world - with an individuality that comes from sharply evoked characters set in a coherently imagined environment. Modern Wales is interpreted as a confused negotiation between a slightly tawdry idealism, represented by Meyrick (an excellent Robert Blythe), and a canny realism, represented by his down-and-out friend Speed (Rhys Ifans). Meyrick owns a junk shop, and the play takes place in its back room. Surrounded by the recovered wreckage of other people's lives, he nurses his grandiose longings; Speed prefers to believe that you're better off playing the system. The other three characters share various degrees of halfwittedness and mania. Out of such intractable material, the human equivalent of his piles of junk, Meyrick hopes to forge his visions; Speed mines them for information and for money.

There are times when Badfinger seems more like a succession of stand-up comic routines than a story. Harris has a Mametlike ear for the energy and eloquence of colloquial idioms, and occasionally indulges in his characters linguistic eccentricities at the expense of dramatic tightness. But the play accumulates tension rapidly, and ends in a poignantly swift shattering of its various desperate illusions. The five-man cast does well; Jason Hughes is particularly noteworthy as Meyrick s inappropriate protege. Badfinger (which closes on Saturday) isn't perhaps the finished article, but when Harris has gone on to greater things you may want to be able to say you were there.

Copyright Spectator Mar 22, 1997
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