Is it loyalty to write a play about how wrong your husband was? That’s one of many intriguing moral queries raised but not developed by journalist Sarah Helm’s ‘fictionalised memoir’, inspired by her marriage to Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, at the time of the Iraq War.
You have to feel for Helm, a foreign-affairs expert who seems to have been astonishingly free to eavesdrop on dynamite conversations between her husband, Blair, Bush and Clinton, but had to keep schtum about what would have been the scoop of the decade. Helm is talking now – albeit through the legally evasive device of a journalist called Laura, (made very nearly likeable by the excellent Maxine Peake).
In her phone-filled, highly alarmed Stockwell home, Laura feels ‘sick’ and ‘ashamed’ as husband Nick ignores her prophetic warnings about the lack of WMD and continues the 24/7 task of bolstering PM Tony, who phones frequently for ego-massages, strategic advice or the football scores.
Most of the comedy in Edward Hall’s warm production comes from Patrick Baladi’s nicely Teflon performance as the PM. And Helm’s play makes hay in the contrast between Downing Street and the amiable chaos of Nick and Laura’s household, with off-stage kids, a truly heroic Polish au pair and blundering builders.
The spirit of the dodgy dossier is nicely enacted when Laura Googles Year 6 classroom notes on Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia to help Blair twist Kofi’s arm for that vital UN resolution.
Fiction that dips in to public record often gets held back by the facts. Ironically, Helm’s play is insufficiently sexed up to work as pure drama. As a New Labour exposé, it lacks a smoking gun. Even the newly topical phone chat between pro-war Rupert Murdoch and Blair has already been exposed by Freedom of Information searches and Murdoch’s own pro-war openness. Helm’s opposition to the war seems real and deeply felt.
But ‘Loyalty’ is lopsided in the sympathetic opportunities for self-justification that it affords to Laura: so much so that, after two hours, I was irrationally tempted to say: ‘I agree with Nick’.