Parliamentary Play

On Friday we travelled to the West Yorkshire Playhouse to see the play, House, which had transferred from London. It was a work of faction set in the House of Commons during the Labour governments of 1974/79. It used the device of focusing on the two Whips Offices and the main protagonists were the four whips in each office. From my reading it would appear that the play was historically accurate, though obviously it did not reflect the exact words spoken.

Now superficially this is a very dry subject and one would think have difficulty in sustaining nearly three hours of entertainment, yet it was witty, had pace, character development and moral dilemmas. The acting was powerful within the confines of a simple set that wittily had devices like an opening for the member’s bar. It also teased the political nerd in me, apart from the whips the MPs were rarely called name but rather their moniker was the constituency that they represented. This meant that all the time I was trying to identify the name of the MP. Some were easy like the member for Henley, Michael Heseltine, while it took me a long time to identify the member for Newham North East as Reg Prentice.

The play framed the parliamentary session as an adversarial contest between the Labour whips who were trying to maintain a minority government, and the Conservative whips who were hell bent on bringing it down. It did shine a light on a parliamentary system that counted MPs as voting who were on hospital beds in the precincts of parliament. This presented the classic device of the whip agonising whether to bring a member into vote if it could cause them harm.

It did seem like a bygone age in the language, bullying, and treatment/lack of women. Then I read the weekend’s headlines about bullying in parliament and I wondered!

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening helped by good company, and a great Indian meal in advance.