A PLAY about the origins of the European Union hardly sounds the most enticing of prospects, and Tim Luscombe’s new work doesn’t always grip. But the playwright, and the director, Anthony Clark, creditably deal with that unpromising subject matter in a drama that repeatedly emphasises the impact that policy decisions have on human lives.
Luscombe’s writing shifts between decades, administrations and locations as he traces the Union’s development from the postwar federal dream of Jean Monnet — the high-ranking civil servant who created the plan to which the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman gave his name — to the messy compromises of subsidy, quotas and muddle-headed directives that followed.
At the centre of his episodic narrative is Bill Bretherton, a romantic youth whose Civil Service career is an escape from his working-class roots in a Suffolk fishing family, and who is as passionate about a united Europe as he is about Pippa, his No 10 co-worker.
We watch Bill’s idealism being eroded, and powerful individuals, from Edward Heath, the Prime Minister, to a member of the Mafia to the Pope, try to exploit the European concept. Meanwhile, families such as Bill’s see their livelihood destroyed by inflexible rulings enforced by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
Luscombe is fiercely critical of Britain’s island mentality, with snobbery, imperialism, xenophobia and ignorance all playing their part in the play’s debate. Even so, his characterisation and dialogue strain to accommodate so much complex information, and the overall tone is too didactic.
Advertisement
Still, Clark’s production is admirably lively and well performed by a quick-changing cast of five. Particularly good is Carolyn Pickles as the enraged wife of a fisherman forced by Robert Hands’s middle-aged Bill, by then an embittered fisheries official, literally to burn his boat. And as Edward Heath, Simon Robson conveys ferocious ambition, cool deliberation and a conveniently sliding scale of political integrity.
This is a play that is often undeniably hard work; but it is, equally undeniably, a courageous piece, and one that succeeds in making you feel, some of the time at least, the force of its characters’ convictions.
Box office: 020-7722 9301