Gesthamane by Lucy Robinson

Gesthamane by David Hare, Theatre Royal, Brighton, 31st March 2009

Emily Priscott is a second year History student at the University of Sussex. Her special interests include literary, film and fashion history of the 20th century. Upon completing her degree she plans to study for an MA in Fashion Culture and History at the London College of Fashion. Lucy Robinson teaches Emily on the second year history course at Sussex, ‘The Blocked Sixties’.

Party fundraising is central to David Hare’s new play, Gesthamane, which examines the extent to which the values of donors can seemingly be at odds with those of the political party that they are financing. Commotion threatens this already heady mixture in the form of a family scandal involving the Home Secretary’s ‘dope’-smoking daughter and disgraced husband, jeopardizing her integrity and political future.

During the course of play we are introduced to a series of familiar characters, including a drum-playing Prime Minister, dubious donor and the requisite conscience of the whole fiasco, the disillusioned teacher. Despite Hare’s insistence that Gesthamane is ‘pure fiction’, the central characters bare more than a passing resemblance to key figures within the Labour government under Tony Blair; the subtle change in the Prime Minister’s musical instrument of choice (from the guitar to the drums) cannot distract the audience from his otherwise perfect resemblance to Blair, and the re-working of the drug scandal to involve the daughter of the Home Secretary rather than the son of the Prime Minister is a thin disguise. Lord Levy also appears in the form of the party donor with questionable motives. Owing to this slightly transparent camouflage, one can’t help but wonder whether or not this play might have been more effective if it had been produced during Blair’s leadership, when the ‘cash for honors’ scandal erupted and threatened, for a breathless moment, to topple the whole administration.

Viewed now, it all seems a little ‘old hat’ in terms of the issues it explores, with Hare spouting conventional criticisms of the Labour Party system without ever actually giving the audience any sense of hope or solutions for the future: the play therefore is neither shocking nor inspiring. One does not sympathise with the characters because of this, although the acting was consistently good, and is left feeling strangely flat by the end of the performance.

The production in general, with its minimalist set and use of classical music remixes during scene changes was slick, but this does not save the play from seeming strangely irrelevant and lacking in real impetus. Emily Priscott

Hare collates a joyful list of allusions to New Labour transgressions. On Brighton’s opening night each one was hilariously augmented by an ‘oh no!’ from one member of the audience. Hare might describe his work as fiction, but his characterisation verged on cartoon caricatures of well known players like Levy, Jowell, Hewitt and Blair and he romped through New Labour’ sins; property deals, pension fraud, education and family scandals, particularly husbands in legal trouble overseas and teenage children behaving like teenagers, fund raising seductions, tax breaks for supporters, and the absurdity of accepting the supposed superiority of private education. For the audience, these political sins were all overshadowed by the coincidental pertinance of a story about how much damage the sexual indiscretions of female minister’s family can cause.

For Hare’s New Labour however, politics gets in the way. Finance is the big issue and the system functions against ideology. Hare’s New Labour doesn’t under stand why we hate them. They think it used to be because they were too socialist and now its because they aren’t socialist enough. But maybe its nothing to do with socialism, nothing at all. Maybe its because they’re politicians. Hare’s closing scene asks us – what we do with our doubts about the world? At Gethsame the whole point of Jesus’s doubt his refusal to act on it. Biblical doubt therefore became a process that is validated by not acting on it. The question for us then is, if we know that we doubt not just New Labour but the whole financial and moral world of parliamentary politics –are we going to act on our doubt?

Lucy Robinson