Theatre

When accused of being too politically correct, Nick Hytner, the National Theatre’s artistic director, is in the habit of saying ‘Find me a good right-wing play and I will put it on.’ He could never have anticipated that such a piece would come from Howard Brenton, the man who once drew swords with Mary Whitehouse over ‘The Romans in Britain’, and who has regularly collaborated with Tariq Ali on such clunky satires as ‘Ugly Rumours’ and ‘Snogging Ken’. But this week ‘Never So Good’ with Jeremy Irons opens at the National Theatre, a surprisingly sympathetic play and certainly not a satire about Harold Macmillan, the patrician Tory Prime Minister who was brought down by the Profumo Affair in 1963.
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Brenton’s conversion is far more shocking than David Mamet’s announcement that he is no longer a ‘brain-dead liberal’. The surprise is not just that the playwright, who still describes himself as ‘a left-wing pinko’, feels sympathy for a Tory, but also that he was born in 1942, part of the generation that was all too keen to see the secretive, deferential world that Macmillan represented swept away. And in the early days of fringe theatre Brenton and his old friend David Hare exploited the new freedoms with the company Portable Theatre in every possible way.

He and Hare were later to collaborate on ‘Pravda’ (1985), a satire on the newspaper industry that gave Anthony Hopkins one of his greatest parts as the reptilian newspaper owner, Lambert Le Roux. The pair even sound a bit alike and share a similar sense of humour although Brenton is more dreamy and less prickly than his former colleague.

Squirming a bit with embarrassment, Brenton agrees that he loathed Macmillan when he was young. ‘He seemed,’ he says, ‘to represent this intolerable stuffiness and actually he was wrestling with political problems – such as whether to be America’s ally or a leader in Europe – that he couldn’t resolve then and they still can’t today.’ He goes as far as to say that ‘there’s an element of apology’ in ‘Never So Good’ although he began the project simply because ‘I wanted to show that politics works by self-enclosed elites and this was one that ran most of the twentieth century in Britain. Then they had a great catastrophe in the Suez crisis which in the end did them in.’ So he didn’t expect to be so moved as he sat in the Bodleian Library reading Macmillan’s diaries.

‘There are some wonderful passages. His handwriting was bad because he was shot through his hand in the war and you can see it becoming almost illegible late at night both with exhaustion and drink. And there’s a wonderful first mention of the Profumo Affair as if it’s this casual little thing. He doesn’t know that Nemesis has arrived. He became a figure of fun and ridicule but he was a brilliant man with a huge hinterland.’ The playwright comes out with the startling fact that Atlee once said that Macmillan could have been a great leader of the Labour Party. When I ask Brenton whether he could imagine writing about Blair or Thatcher in the same way, he screws up his face and says it wouldn’t be interesting.

‘There’s something moral about Macmillan. Despite his ability to infight, there was a breadth to him, unlike many of the leaders today who only know about politics. Since the ’60s, the leaders have got shabbier and shabbier.’ Macmillan was also remarkable for his tolerance of his wife’s long-running, open affair with his parliamentary colleague Bob Boothby. ‘He had a fatalistic strength,’ says Brenton, ‘which was wholly admirable. It was an ability to endure.’

Brenton is a prolific playwright – there are about 40 plays – but fell out of fashion at the end of the ’90s and found it hard to get his work staged, re-emerging as a major contributor to the TV series ‘Spooks’ from 2002 . Television often has a bad effect on playwrights, but ‘Spooks’ seems to have made Brenton a tighter writer. ‘Paul’, staged at the National Theatre in 2005, was a tough, rigorous examination of the early days of Christianity and why it survived when so many other religions didn’t.

He’s keen to write more and at 65 says he is suffering from ‘old-man-in-a-hurry-itis, before the short-term memory problems kick in and create a strange late period’. But there are to be no more history plays. ‘I’ve written three now: “Paul”, “In Extremis” [seen at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2006] and “Never So Good”. I’ve now got to write a play with people walking around on mobile phones.’

‘Never So Good’ is playing at the National Theatre Lyttelton.