1997: Landslide

06 March - 05 April 1997 West Yorkshire Playhouse

11 April - 03 May 1997 Birmingham Repertory Theatre

“A New Labour MP unseats the local Tory as Labour wins the election with a massive majority in Andy de la Tour’s hugely agreeable, nostalgic satire. Christopher Ravenscroft is a deliciously reptilian Tory and Deborah Norton is outstanding as his loyal wife.”

Election fever is set to grip audiences with the tale of a fictional Conservative MP who embarks on a revenge mission when he loses his seat to a female Labour candidate. Landslide, by Andy de la Tour, is set in the summer of 1997 after a huge swing to Labour. The play centres on the relationship between defeated Tory St John Hewitt (Christopher Ravenscroft) and new Labour MP Fliss Anderson (Jenna Russell). The new MP tries to make peace with her predecessor, but he is intent on gaining revenge through a property scam.

“It was inspired by the fear of an election where there is no real choice offered. The new Labour MP goes to St John Hewitt looking for political support and he teaches her how to be a successful politician at the expense of the people who vote for you. One of the central themes of the play is that life will go on probably pretty much as it has been for most people for the last few years.” — Andy De La Tour

“It’s great to be directing a play like this - it fosters a real level of lively debate. St John Hewitt is ‘Old Tory’, a Tory from the ruling classes.” — Gwenda Hughes

The Independent, March 17, 1997.

Strange how a new play that is not only up to the minute but plausibly beyond it should be so old-fashioned. True our first sight is of the lady of the house carrying a cafetiere rather than a maid carrying a silver tea-pot, but in every other way we could be in one of Pinero’s social plays. Bang Andy de la Tour’s walls and they sound reassuringly of the joists of solid construction and best lime-and-hair characterisation. This is appropriate enough, for the work depends on the kind of exact social detail - well delivered in Gwenda Hughes’s production - that only realism can provide. It becomes apparent, too, that its stylistic devotion to tradition mirrors an ideological one.

The landslide of the title belongs first to Tony Blair and to the new MP for Benton, Felicity - or more New Labourishly, Fliss - Anderson (Jenna Russell). It took a 19 per cent swing to dislodge St John Hewitt from the seat his forebears had held since Lloyd George was in his pomp, but St John, a quintessential One Nation man with a mind as broad as his acres, is apparently taking it well. When Fliss comes to Benton Hall to enlist his aid in shelving an intrusive local development plan he acquiesces. “How very civil this country is,” says his son Peter. A little too predictably, the middle ground soon extends to the bedroom.

The attraction of Christopher Ravenscroft’s St John is his patrician mix of languid grace and mocking acerbity, not least towards his own side. But, as a politician, he would not set Machiavelli to school, he could teach him at home, and once having out-manoeuvred Fliss in furtherance of his own rapacious land-deal, he amuses himself by tutoring her.

She proves an apt pupil, and, ourselves undergoing a crash course in planning politics, we witness the skill and ruthlessness with which Fliss exacts her revenge and hauls herself the first few feet up Westminster’s greasy pole.

The baleful and believable point is that the cynicism of decayed Toryism and the ambition of ingenue Labour meet on the same ground of self-seeking. As John Branwell’s wonderfully gruff and wounded Old Labourite, and Deborah Norton’s Tory wife, both recognise, neither St John nor Fliss have any value system outside their own interest. De la Tour’s satire of both is well observed and, until the melodramatic conclusion, fillets very finely.

But, like most satirists, his vision is fundamentally pessimistic and nostalgic. His disgust at St John is mainly at the personal pathology, glimpsed from the start in Ravenscroft’s lip and eye, which is destroying Peter (the fine Raymond Coulthard). The only cynosure is the wife, Jessica, with her dignity, good works and profound sense of the family’s duty to its inheritance and the community. Nuanced and sympathetic as Deborah Norton is in the role, if New Labour can furnish no more than Lady Bountiful’s trug we are in trouble.

© Jeffrey Wainwright The Independent, 1997

Bedroom Politics: The Times, 1997

The lights go up on a glass-roofed room, perhaps a former orangery, at stately Benton House. Wisteria hangs in festoons outside the windows. French doors open onto the terrace and a panorama of rural Lancashire. Has Andy de la Tour’s play transported us back 40 years to the social comedies where Dame Thissy-That strolled in with an armful of flowers and jabbed them into vases?

No, but also yes. The play’s melodramatic events take place later this year, after a Labour win turfs cynical St John Hewitt, Benton’s squire, from his safe Tory seat, replacing him with Felicity Anderson, a young lass committed to compassion, profoundly pro-people. But this sort of issue drama harks back to times long gone by, when customary practice counterpointed attitudes to some national problem with a domestic difficulty, generally a tangled love affair.

I don’t say this history disqualifies the play from serious consideration. De la Tour writes scenes that are clever or exciting and sometimes both; and the mechanics of construction are soundly planned. Sometimes I believed these characters could actually exist, though not for long. For that was the trouble with this old kind of drama. A formula is a formula, whether the new PM is Blair or Baldwin.

The public issue is whether St John has the right to do what he likes with his land. Felicity sides with his wife and son, who don’t want Benton Wood chopped down to make way for luxury homes and a hefty profit. Present and past MP pass a night together. He outwits her, she learns fast, betrays a few principles and ends up the victor. But he goes one better yet.

The cast work hard to breathe life and background into their roles. Christopher Ravenscroft, ramrod stiff, persuasively suggests St John’s complacency and cruelty, which allows us to accept, just, the ready obedience of his wife (Deborah Norton). Jenna Russell’s Felicity catches the dishevelled look of a political innocent and the cool suavity of the ambitious animal she becomes. But never could she have transformed herself so fast so thoroughly, with the wisteria still in full flower.

On the whole Gwenda Hughes paces the actors well enough. One lesson the play teaches is never trust a politician who says: “Trust me.” But perhaps we know that already.

© Jeremy Kingston The Times, 1997