This House

(This is London)

       

The Cottesloe has been transformed into a mini version of the House of Commons for James Graham’s lively and immensely enjoyable new play about the behind the scenes machinations in the world of Westminster.

Seated on opposing green leather benches, the audience is whisked back to 1974 as, to the chagrin of chief whip Humphrey Atkins (Julian Wadham) and his privately educated cronies, the Conservatives topple. Forced to exchange the plush government office for the opposition’s far shabbier accommodation, they’re doubly motivated to pull out all the stops to overturn the Labour party’s tenuous victory in a hung parliament and get back into power.

Graham depicts a cut-throat world where personal life is sacrificed to the demands of the job, MPs are summoned from hospital beds and turfed out of toilets to make up the voting numbers and ancient traditions exist side by side with modern tactics. Well researched, wittily written, and smoothly directed by Jeremy Herrin, it briefly introduces a host of unnamed MPs (most identified only by their constituencies) but keeps the focus predominantly on the efforts of the whips to secure those vital votes.

 

Philip Glenister’s Walter Harrison (a Yorkshireman with more than a few tricks up his strategic sleeve) and a sleek Charles Edwards as his Tory counterpart Bernard Weatherill particularly impress and, with the current run sold out before press night, a welldeserved transfer to the large space of the Olivier has already been scheduled for February next year.

Cottesloe Until 1st December