A war over oil, waged against the wishes of the UN and supported by dodgy intelligence. A British prime minister sending troops to topple the leader of an Arab nation. Anti-war demonstrations at home.
The Suez crisis of 1956 was Anthony Eden’s nightmare, but the similarities between one PM called Anthony and another are too obvious to need italicising. James Graham’s new play about Eden simply needs to show a prime minister worn down by the cares of office and consumed by an intractable crisis in the Middle East.
Suez destroyed Eden’s 21-month premiership and his reputation but Graham also wants to reminds us that, like Blair, for most of his career he enjoyed tremendous popularity.
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The epitome of Englishness, his qualifications were as impeccable as his tailoring: Eton, Christ Church, a First World War Military Cross, an MP at 26, resigning in protest at appeasement with Hitler, years of service as a respected Foreign Secretary and successor-in-waiting to Winston Churchill.
All this detail, bar the use of two cartoonish reporters, is deftly conveyed with the cast at times expressing the diplomatic jockeying of postwar Europe, its battered remains echoed in a half-burnt map at the back of the stage, in the form of a tango. As Eden the dapper diplomat, Jamie Newall seems to have stepped out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh or Noël Coward until a botched gall bladder operation leaves him addicted to amphetamines that exacerbate his irritability.
Like this unhealthy Eden, Gemma Fairlie’s production tends to lose its spark as the second half becomes a more conventional account of the Suez crisis, prompted by Egypt’s Colonel Nasser nationalising the canal, a vital oil-bearing waterway owned by a Franco-British consortium. Unable to see Nasser without a swastika on his arm, Eden ends up conspiring with Israel to cook up an excuse for Britain and France to seize the canal.
Yet the play still intrigues as we see Ted Pleasance’s Churchill prevaricating about when he’ll make way for Eden and Kevin Quarmby’s chancellor, Harold Macmillan, positioning himself for No 10. There’s warmth, too, in the relationship between Newall’s Eden and Daisy Beaumont as his second wife, here a constant support as events unravel that will send him into the history books as a political flop.
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