Gethsemane at Cottesloe Theatre

Everyone likes wit. Wit adds to the sum of human happiness via such releases as giggling and, if you were the man sitting next to me, crying ‘bravo’ in your plumiest voice. It is a bonus if the wit is woven into a thought-provoking story and in the case of David Hare’s Gethsemane, on show at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre, that story is about the money, politics and power play behind New Labour. Sexy themes I think you’ll agree.

This play could be described from a variety of angles depending on which character you take as your lead. There is the high stakes domestic battle that takes place when the Home Secretary’s sarcastic teenage daughter, Suzette, threatens her mother’s reputation with drug taking and journalist shagging. This brightly coloured ball of teenage fury has the ultimate ammunition in the parent/child war as she can legitimately scream, ‘I hate you! The whole country hates you!’

The Home Secretary, played by Tamsin Greig  (a familiar face best known for cult comedy Green Wing), brings a note of plausibility to her cautious politician’s mantle. When she complains of her job: ‘We live on a small island and everybody’s trying to get in,’ you don’t exactly feel sympathetic, but it highlights the fact that beneath their media posturing MPs do actually have a complicated job to do…and families to raise.

It is a mark of good drama when characters manage to be both realistic and representative of universal themes and questions. In the ‘stuff ideology I want to help me and my friends enjoy the good life’ corner we have Otto Fallon the amicable, sleazy, Labour Party fundraiser and his dry gay assistant (‘I had sex with a woman once. It was nice but non-addictive’). These guys have a hotline to Alex; the floppy-haired, jeans-clad Prime Minister who we first see giving his drum kit an earnest beating.

Representing the voice of intelligent dissent we have Lori Drysdale, Suzette’s ex-teacher and confidante whose verbal joust with Otto Fallon about the merits of New Labour is perhaps the straightest version of what David Hare thought on that can of worms. Because really, Gethsemane, a political diatribe rather than theatre, does not play it straight in either form or content. It weaves in and out through the personal and political, leaving you slightly dizzied but very entertained by whether this rich and wordy piece of craft is really saying that much. A little bit like New Labour.

Gethsemane runs until February 24
Cottesloe Theatre
National Theatre
Southbank SE1 9PX

Box office: 020 7452 3000