Producing This House in the Oxford Union was not merely a stroke of theatrical brilliance, it was also a provocation. For only three nights, from the 6th to the 8th of March, the debating chamber of the Union became a stage – no longer for the theatrical squabbles of hacking season, but for James Graham’s 2012 masterpiece, This House. The script was Graham’s first major work, and secured his place as one of the last great political satirists, a writer whose blend of unflinching observation and tenderness is ultimately born from optimism. Here his dialogue is tense, terse, witty, whip-like; well suited to the charged air which fills the corridors, halls, and chambers of Westminster. Indeed, for us in the audience, that crackle in the air is portentous. We all know that a storm is coming.
Yet, during the first blistering minutes of This House, it seems that the only people who know less than we do are the characters themselves. A rumour is going around: the governing Conservatives, under the leadership of Ted Heath, are about to call a snap general election. They do and, by the slimmest of margins, they lose. But Labour haven’t managed a majority either. The result of the February 1974 ballot is therefore a hung parliament.
Graham’s focus is on the two parties’ whip teams: Labour, led first by Bob Mellish (Alex McGovern), then later by Michael Cocks (Ella Craddock); and the Conservatives, under the imperious direction of Humphrey Atkins (Caitlin O’Sullivan). Despite Tory predictions that a Labour minority government won’t last four weeks, the whips cobble together the “odds and sods” (Liberals and various nationalists) with enough regularity to make it to October. That month, another election gives Labour the thinnest of majorities: three seats.
From here on, the question is survival. The Conservatives do all that they can to bring down the government. Their whips intend to manufacture an administration defeat of sufficient magnitude to call a vote of no confidence, the loss of which would precipitate another general election, while Labour do all that they can just to keep their heads above water. Underpinning all of this is a bet – with steadily escalating financial stakes – between the two deputy whips, Labour’s Walter Harrison (Ishy Levy) and the Conservatives’ Bernard Weatherill (Jules Upson), over whether the government will last the full five years. As Labour begins to collapse in on itself, the party’s rationale becomes keeping the other guys out, or more precisely, keeping “Her” out. For, looming over the play is the shadowy, but emerging, figure of “the Lady”, Mrs Thatcher.
This House was staged in the Union’s debating chamber, the Commons in miniature; surely the most theatrical non-theatre space in Oxford. Rarely is there such a perfect alignment of a play with its situation. In the audience, arrayed backbencher-like on three sides of the stage, the abiding sense was not only of watching the life, the mess, the comedy and the tragedy of British parliamentary democracy, but of participating in it. The set, comprising two whips’ offices and various thoroughfares, when coupled with an audience in the round, could have been unwieldy. Thankfully, however, the direction of Lucas Angeli was almost always utterly meticulous. The impression of watching so many of the scenes was akin to looking at something actually composed, and I mean composed in the sense that, say, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is composed. For just those two-and-a-bit hours, as whips and unruly MPs charged in and out, bellowed and blustered, hurled insults down the phone lines, nursed injured pride and bruised ambitions, all squabblings became symphonic.
No doubt this show also benefited immensely from the remarkable talents of its cast. As Bob Mellish, Alex McGovern was a coiled spring, liable to burst into verbal, or even physical, violence at any given moment. That said, it was also entirely clear from McGovern’s performance why the rest of the Labour team was so devoted to him. Yet Graham’s Mellish is a man in the Thucydidean sense, and after sticking his neck out for the wrong guy in the 1976 leadership election, he accepts his fate without complaints and bows out. His successor, Ella Craddock’s beleaguered Michael Cocks, is then yoked to his party’s terrible fate. But even as every taste of victory turns increasingly to that of ashes, Craddock never stops fighting or finding the comedy.
Across the aisle, the oppositional (in all senses) O’Sullivan’s Atkins was magnetic. Sure, her performance was technically good, but it was the growing gleam in her eye that lingers for me – that of the huntsman realising that the fox is cornered. The ensemble were also some of the best that I have seen in “minor” roles since coming to Oxford. Lydia Free and Misha Pemberthy were particularly memorable; whether as intransigent (even downright loopy) MPs, or as one rather moving political wife. Amusingly, Union President Charlie Mackintosh made his own bewigged appearance as the Speaker of the House, perhaps getting all the shouting he wishes he could do within the Chamber out of his system before his term ends.
Angeli here deserves further credit. Across the board, basic things like diction, projection, and movement in character were solid, while every single line reading was sharp and well mined. That never just happens. It comes down to the director. Moreover, this review would be remiss if it failed to mention the enormous newsreels (edited by Finlay Jordan) which were projected onto the walls of the chamber at significant moments. The sudden technicolour bursts were a reminder that these little offices exist in a very large context. Corridors of power indeed.
With that in mind, underneath all the surface froth, the foundations of This House rest with the two deputy whips: the aforementioned Harrison (Levy) and Weatherill (Upson). Both men are to some extent unicorns in their parties. Harrison gets on with everyone, managing to circumvent the petty factionalism which so often plagues Labour. And Weatherill seems to lack most of that triumphal conviction of superiority which buoys so many Conservatives. Even as the relationship between the parties frays and the “usual channels” (of communication) start to shut down, Harrison and Weatherill retain an underpinning of mutual respect.
The emotional crux of the play comes with the 1979 vote of no confidence in James Callaghan’s Labour ministry. The month of the vote, March, was also the month in which the “Doc”, the longtime Labour MP Sir Alfred Broughton, was dying. Over the course of the parliament his health had worsened, exacerbated by frequent travel to Westminster in order to prop the government up on key votes. Now the Labour whips know that the Doc is willing to make the journey down for the confidence vote, they know that the count is going to be so close, and they also know that the effort will likely kill him.
In desperation, Harrison goes to Weatherill and asks for a “pair”. Pairing is a convention, a gentleman’s agreement, the history of which stretches murkily back through the centuries, and holds that in the event one party cannot get their MP to a vote, the other party will withdraw one of theirs from voting, negating the impact of the absence. Pairing is a contentious topic in this bitterly divided parliament, and nobody anticipates its usage on something so controversial as a no confidence vote. Despite knowing that in Thatcher’s Conservative Party, anyone who pairs themself with the Doc will be sacrificing their career, Weatherill offers himself. Perhaps moved, perhaps instinctively responding to honour with honour, Harrison declines.
The results of the motion are 311 “Aye”, 310 “No”. The government therefore falls, by one vote. Labour made it four-and-a-half years, but not five. At the ensuing election, Thatcher’s Conservatives sweep in, the first of four victories, and the beginning of 18 years in the wilderness for Labour. Harrison, having lost the bet, pays up, pointing out to the protesting Weatherill that in his shoes, he would take the money.
Throughout This House, the running joke is that the British parliamentary system would be entirely unimpeachable, were it not reliant on people. But in the end, Graham lifts the curtain, if only a corner, on what a system reliant on good people might look like. The play is a reminder that conventions built on decency and honour have the capacity to produce better, kinder politics, if people will only be decent and honourable. Is it naive? Perhaps. But I do know that everything which Graham depicts really did happen. Weatherill really made the offer, and Harrison really turned him down. And, Sir Alfred Broughton really did die on the 2nd of April, five days after the confidence vote.
For those who approach the Union with disdain – and there are many – the darkest moments of the play, those in which people pursued petty rivalries and the baubles of status, mirrored the darkest instincts of the Union: personalities with no policies, politics with no stakes. This House, then, is an object lesson in never losing sight of the fact that whilst politics may be theatrical, it is not theatre; a lesson that those who wish to wield power – now or in the future – must avoid the comforts of myopia. It has become a commonplace that democracy is not something you do once every five years at the ballot box, but rather a continuous reaffirmation. Well, just as that has been said so many times before, so still it must be said. This house, our Parliament, is often described as creaking and straining, and the broken and discordant chimes of Big Ben in the play are taken by some characters as an omen. Listen then, and be better.