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  1. Culture
10 May 2010updated 27 Sep 2015 2:19am

Election drama

Playwrights stay up past bedtime to produce instant political theatre.

By Gina Allum

The play’s the thing: as politicians stayed up way past bedtime on 6 May, a group of playwrights were also pulling an all-nighter to script five brand new dramas. Whilst politicos struggled with squaring the circles of government by Venn diagram, the “first five plays of the new parliament” were cast, rehearsed and produced by the Supporting Wall theatre company in just 24 hours. The resulting show was Election Drama, a one-night-only, rapid response to the election, which was staged at the New Players Theatre barely 48 hours after polls closed. Truly a breathtaking feat of theatrical chutzpah.

There was a palpable party mood amongst the youngish, probably leftish spectators, even if the party had overtones of the ship’s band on the deck of the Titanic. Election metaphors flew everywhere: when someone was given a seat number in a non-existent row B, it was suggested by the man next to me that she “enter into negotiations with Rows A and C”.

Staged just round the corner from where the “Take Back Parliament” protest had begun only hours before, this was a rare opening for dramatists to engage directly with unfolding events — and to take the piss out of Ukip. Would they seize the opportunity to hang a tale on a hung parliament, or would they bottle it?

In truth, aside from some last minute on-trend references, carbon dating the moment of performance, as it were, the playlets could have been written at any time over the past year. But there was no doubting the authentic rawness of the performances as the actors struggled, scripts in hand, to deliver these newly-hatched dramas. At times, it was like watching a rehearsed reading; at others, the performers managed to deliver substantially more.

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Our compères for the evening were the producers Ben Monks and Will Young, and in the spirit of making it up as you go along, they were standing in for an unknown celeb who couldn’t make it (praise be). In fact, they were in danger of upstaging the actors in the likeability stakes, and their “back-room boy pushed to front of stage” personae worked like a charm.

The plays themselves were a varied bunch. Most eschewed actual politicians, perhaps confirming their irrelevance in everyday affairs. As might be expected, given the exigencies of rehearsal time and brevity, the most successful were those with sensibly curtailed aims, and the sort of broad-brush strokes that an audience can grasp quickly. That said, there was at times a real flexing of ambition.

Understandably, two of the playwrights scavenged off existing texts: Rex Obano’s The Wrong Party reworked The Birthday Party and reproduced the surreal Pinteresque menace pretty well. A dishevelled and stringy Brown — looking absolutely nothing like Brown — is browbeaten by thuggish apparatchiks, the reincarnations of Pinter’s Goldberg and McCann, who wring the requisite ambiguity and threat from the word “Party”. The second overt hommage was Phil Wilmott’s Act IV, which was a resetting of Uncle Vanya. And although there simply wasn’t time to get it in full colour, the Chekhovian mood of disconsolate lassitude was spot on. The Russian gentry are transformed into a political dynasty on its uppers, sitting amidst the remains of the night’s takeaway feast.

Just as in politics, women tended to be sidelined in these plays, with the notable exception of Megan Ford’s Human Interest, which took this very marginalisation as its theme. A light gloss on the political WAGs, with cursory name changes (Brown to White; Sam Cam to Shabo), it was also the vehicle for the performance of the night. Sian Robins-Grace pulled off an inspired turn as a self-seeking TV presenter, and brought the house down as she leered, simpered and winked at the camera, all pertness and no pertinence.

The other short that I thought worked well was Anders Lustgarten’s Bang Up, which dealt with the definitively disenfranchised — prisoners — on election night. A black crack-dealer’s perception of himself as a true Tory (pays no tax, is self-reliant) was first class mischief. However, the final moments, when the Afghan prisoner is deported, slightly over-stretched this neat, diagrammatic piece. The final show, Che Walker’s Two Thousand and Twelve, seemed to be pulled in many directions, from Greek mythology to post-Afghanistan stress, via a bleak dystopian near-future. Despite its eye wateringly brutal language of “single slut mums” and “cage fighter daddies”, it never really rose off the page.

So a patchy but passionate evening, during whiche not every word counted. Just like the election, then.

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