After the silly synthetic fun of the swinging Sixties, the period 1974 – 1979 was not especially enjoyed by most countries around the world. Tom Scott called the 70s in New Zealand “the decayed decade”. In the UK it was especially dire. Westminster became the Colosseum, Downing Street the local bear pit.  

The country that had once dominated the world in many spheres for centuries was the new “Sick man of Europe”.  It was financially flat and had palpably run out of ideas. The postwar compact between Conservatives and Labour, accepting the welfare State and placating the rampant unions, had run into an enervating stalemate. Both parties were glumly agreed and sorely aggrieved for it. The public were flat broke and bored.

Yet inside the House of Commons things were getting interesting – sort of. Harold Wilson had been thrown out in 1970 but in 1974 so had Edward Heath. Wilson came back with no real majority in early 1974 and tried again with little success later in the year then struck a precarious deal with the Liberals for staying in power at any cost. That at least injected some raw drama: not a drama of ideas but of gross animal survival.

This House, a typically anodyne British expression of parliamentary unity in times of game-changing dysfunction, is both the title and theme rolled into one. Little-heralded author James Graham chose his dramatic moment well.  

On any given day it was hard to say what the House actually consisted of or, dare one say it, stood for. The only game in town was staying in office till tomorrow. At times in the play it feels like it’s really the Titanic’s iceberg phase as viewed through the engine room. (The ship went down in just over two hours; the Government took well over four bleakly comical years.) 

The action does not venture much onto the Chamber floor. It barely mentions Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Steel, Thorpe or a callow new woman leader of the Opposition called Thatcher. The fulcrum of the workday is in the seedy, joyless offices of the Whips – those disciplinary bloodhounds who keep the Government governing (as it were). This is clumsily done over the heads of opinionated MPs who might otherwise bring it down through a principle-driven rush of blood to the head. The set is massive but all is dwarfed by a life-sized face of the Big Ben clock at the rear, never letting us forget that time is forever a-ticking.

So, the key names are Bob Mellish (Labour Chief Whip) rendered by Bill Daniels and Humphrey Atkins (Conservative Chief Whip) in the form of Julian Wadham. Everything rests on their massive sweat-stained shoulders and those of their long-suffering teams. They are there to coax the ship of state through oil shocks, IMF loan humiliations, IRA atrocities and dyspeptic wildcat strikes in key industries. To that list of woes can be added hissy fits thrown by the handful of cosseted Welsh, Scots and Liberal MPs. It is PTSD in action. Feel free to weep.

To make the shambles work at all the government relies on an honor arrangement between MPs to allow ‘pairs’ so that when, say, the Minister of Defence is in Germany for the day, a matching Opposition MP agrees not to vote and thus gain an unfair advantage. All that parking-ticket-level stuff goes through the Whips office on a wink a nudge and a scribbled note on the wall board. Mistakes occur. More drama. The government actually stays in business over a botched pair. Hatreds build. Honorable MPs become petty and dishonorable. Seriously sick people are stretchered in to vote and, maybe even, die in the ambulance when “pairs are suspended”.

The excellent ensemble NT cast is impressively versatile in delivering dazzling width over tedious depth. They can be a Tory minister one minute then arch fraud John Stonehouse (supposedly) drowning the next. A mere eight stand in convincingly for 650. No mean feat that. The semi-documentary nature of the work has lent itself well to stage then film followed by our televised format. And there is even a hard-punching rock band revelling in the name Acoustic Jim and the Wires that adds a certain something of the 70s.

There are delicious moments like when Big Ben itself suddenly craps out with a tortured despairing clang. Or when a Geordie MP has to pay a fine to the Whips office for speaking her unauthorized mind. (She ekes the money out endlessly from her tiny supermarket purse and insists on paying the exact amount, hunting out the smallest of small change in the face of anguished pleas to stop.) The infamous real incident where Michael Heseltine grabbed the parliamentary mace and menaced members with it is re-enacted with simian rage and indecorous mauling.

The performance could easily lapse into humdrum score-keeping but director Jeremy Hearns (assisted by filmed version director Tim van Someren) always extracts humour, irony, fleeting reality and clever human action from it.

The whole creaky and amoral circus spins to a crashing halt during the so-called winter of discontent of 1979. The most provocative and dogmatic unions were, in effect, running the country and dead bodies were not being buried all over the dystopian realm. There is, at that point, a moment of shining integrity played out between our two chief whips that will surely live in memory. It proves there is honor among slaves. It emphasizes that MPs truly are human beings too.

The ill-begotten Labour government, in the end, went down by one vote (that ironic election night quotation by Mrs Thatcher of St Francis’s loving words played tinnily over the implacable Big Ben image) – ushering in the turbulent and kinetic age of the unfeeling monetarists. Maybe, just maybe, it need not have, as is depicted in a real last-minute situation that few fiction writers would dare to write or actors to act.

This play is gold spun from dross and is both heartfelt and entertaining. Don’t walk by on the other side of the street! 
Watch THIS HOUSE here.

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