Loyalty?

The personal is the political, or so the feminists of the 1970s were wont to say. Sarah Helm’s play Loyalty reverses the maxim: as the Iraq war invades her home and her relationship, the political becomes very personal. ‘Stop the Wore’ The action centres on Laura – a barely-veiled version of Helm herself – and her partner Nick – Sarah Helm’s real-life husband, and Tony Blair’s former chief-of-staff, Jonathan Powell. We watch as she listens in to Nick’s phone calls with Bush. We hear her harangue him about Iraq and Palestine. We see her icing her son’s birthday cake while her house is fitted with security alarms; and smile approvingly at the ‘Stop the Wore’ banner her Polish au pair has made for the protest march. In the second act, protests outside trap Laura in Downing Street, as bricks are thrown at the family home in Stockwell. It’s an interesting concept. Even after a few years of New Labour memoir burnout, it’s still refreshingly frank to expose such personal divisions. But does it work a play? Most of us left feeling it didn’t. Here’s why: ‘This is our life’ The dialogue, we kept saying, was the problem. Sarah Helm is an engaging writer, but dialogue is very different from journalism. As a rule, it’s wise to be wary of a play where one character shouts at another, ‘This is our life!’ as Nick does to Laura in the first part. The scene-setting is done clumsily: ‘We live in a TERRACE house in STOCKWELL’, Nick tells Blair a few minutes in. Having so much dialogue taking place on the phone was never going to be easy but the direction must be partly to blame. ‘There were three of us in this relationship’ For a play about how the war infiltrated Sarah Helm’s relationship, there’s a lot of war, and not that much relationship. There’s little sense of what made Laura and Nick work before Tony and Saddam came on the scene. Their children are heard, but never seen. It’s hard to warm to someone who follows their partner around the house taking notes. The tragedy of what was happening on a grand scale might have been more moving if we’d had a better idea of how it was changing the characters on a small scale. On the other hand, the ‘there-were-three-of-us-in-this-relationship’ aspect is hammed up. Blair was often accused of sofa government. This feels a lot more like bedroom government, as Nick leaps up from bed to take calls and watches Blair wander round Number 10 in socks and boxers. ‘I can’t believe you saw C (the head of the SIS) without me’ a boxers-and-shirt clad Nick tells Tony. Having said this, the actor playing Blair was by far the best – although for any actor now, it’s difficult to avoid playing Michael Sheen playing Tony Blair. Faction ‘Faction’ is always a funny mix; here, the joins showed. It’s clear that this is a semi-fictionalised account but, since it’s often hard to be sure which bits are fiction and which aren’t, the impact can get lost. David Kelly’s death is announced before the invasion takes place. Blair seems to resign much earlier, as a result of the war, which puts a different spin on things. In the audience, we’re left looking a bit puzzled: ‘Did that really happen? Is it a shocking new revelation or just what might have been?’ Despite all this, Loyalty was a good way of getting wonks out the office early – for us; it made the political a bit more social at least. Directed by Edward Hall, Loyalty stars Maxine Peake and Lloyd Owen and is at the Hampstead Theatre until August 13.