Gethsemane - a footnote to Blair and Brown’s legacy

There is only one thing worth consideration in government, says a spinmeistering fundraiser in David Hare's new play, Gethsemane. What works. So let's apply the same test to Hare's latest interpretation of what he terms "public events", and we immediately run into trouble.

For the programme contains a note by Hare that says his work is "pure fiction"; in it, though, Alec Beasley is a be-jeaned Prime Minister in blue suede shoes and a co-dependent relationship with a pony-tailed spiv from Hendon called Otto Fallon who knows about boybands and fleecing star-struck saps of donations for the Labour party. Lori Drysdale is the token Good Person, a teacher, who doesn't take kickbacks or make compromises, so it's all a bit plain really: this is a play about how disappointingly crap the party currently in power has been at sticking by its principles for the past 11 years.

It's not so much theatre of the absurd as theatre of the aggrieved of Hampstead, and on that level, Hare's had to be a lot more careful about what to put in than to leave out. Because let's all be honest here: there were plenty of rich pickings when it came to the dog days of the last Labour leader.

It’s not so much theatre of the absurd as theatre of the aggrieved of Hampstead

This is a play about a government - a Labour government, one can almost hear Neil Kinnock spitting out the words - that came to power on Obama-esquely high expectations but soon palled up with big business and was intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich and then foundered, mainly because it didn't have a moral compass and was blindsided by events, dear boy, events. Or as Meredith Guest, the Home Secretary with a daughter going off the rails and a crim of a husband so succinctly puts it, "Once they hated us because we were socialists, now they hate us because we're not." (Guest is played by a highly watchable, lynx-eyed Tamsin Greig, better known to me at any rate as Debbie Aldridge from the Archers).

But, given the little programme note, I feel inhibited from reading the play as a dramatisation of the important Lord Levy period in the Blair years, so let's not go there, or bring up Tessa Jowell, but instead stick to themes. It's a bit about religion ("the more sceptical the public becomes, the more devout its leaders"), and it's a bit about ambition, and it's a bit about how all political careers end in personal if not public failure, but it's a lot about how Life with a capital L is mostly about making compromises and ordering priorities.

“Once they hated us for being socialists, now they hate us because we’re not.”

So while Hare's play fails to bring the whole Blair thing back into zeitgeisty life, despite the Cool Britannia-style urban London sets and ice-bars and sexy women in pantsuits, it does dwell on some unpleasant truths, such as: journalists are often scuzzy, politicians have to pimp for money, and democracy is nothing more than "organised hypocrisy". Strong, stirring stuff that will endure long after the last copies of Alistair Campbell's diaries have been used for firewood in the long years of recession we are now entering, courtesy of the ruling elites that have entranced D Hare for so long.

It's funny, though - Gordon Brown has only been in power about five minutes but Gethsemane, which doesn't mention Brown, already seems like a coda, a footnote to some Dead Sea Scroll. The era it doesn't allude to (remember that programme note) is only 18-months gone, but for some reason the play doesn't bring back the flavour of that moment with salty bite. But it definitely works, in that in one sense Gethsemane exactly recalls the past: like the Blair government, it started off so promisingly. But most scenes went on for too long, and it ended up not standing for anything much at all.