PLAY SET IN THATCHER ERA EXPLORES TENSION BETWEEN OPPOSING POLITICAL VIEWS
by AMIT ROY
WITH so much poison currently circulating at Westminster, you do wonder what happens especially to male MPs when they go home to their wives.
What if a Brextremist has a remain-leaning wife or possibly the other way round? Jo Johnson’s resignation from his elder brother Boris Johnson’s government indicates blood is thicker than water – but only up to a point. Brexit is certainly taking its toll on family life.
But Hansard, a new play at the National Theatre, directed by Simon Godwin and written by Simon Woods, is not about the consequences of Brexit, despite its name. After all, Hansard is the name given to transcripts of the day-to-day parliamentary exchanges that take place in the Commons and the Lords.
However, Conservative MP, Robin Hesketh, played by Alex Jennings, and his wife of 30 years, Diana, portrayed by Lindsay Duncan – their acting is very persuasive – argue with each other as though they were in the Commons. There seems to be little love between them.
The play is set in 1988 when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Robin, a junior minister, has supported passage of the Local Government Act 1988 which contained the controversial clause 28. Basically, this made it illegal for local authorities or schools to promote homosexuality. His wife, however, is a left-leaning woman with views diametrically opposed to those of her husband.
It is only towards the end of 90-minute piece that the dark secret in the lives of the Heskeths comes to light. That is probably the best bit of the play.
Hansard begins with an emotionally and physically drained Robin returning to his Cotswolds home. It is nearly midday, but he finds Diana lounging around in her dressing gown and he discovers an empty gin bottle in the bin.
“And the Dubonnet too – my God!” he says. “Denis Thatcher has nothing on you.”
The couple are expecting friends to lunch, but the fridge is bare. Diana has not bothered to get in any food.
Later, Robin chastises Diana for not being able to manage lunch: “And nobody else has to put up with this sort of performance. Do they? Even the Tebbits can manage a Sunday lunch, and she’s paralysed from the neck down. If I did murder you, I’d bring this up as a mitigating circumstance.”
Perhaps Woods might want to reconsider this unkind reference to the Tebbits.
The back and forth between Robin and Diana delves into some of the political issues of the day. By and by, the exchanges get increasingly bitter.
Robin admits the great offices of state have eluded him: “Here I am – cursed with emotional intelligence.”
Diana offers another explanation: “I thought you hadn’t made it to the top because you didn’t have the right sort of wife.”
“Nobody thinks that,” her husband assures her.
“Of course, they do,” she insists.
Robin wasn’t being kind: “No, they don’t think you’re left-wing, darling. They think you’re highly strung.”
He absolutely refuses to watch cinefilm of their son Tim cartwheeling. The reason will be revealed towards the end.
She has a withering assessment of Robin’s Eton education: “That’s the trouble with the class system, isn’t it? So easy to mistake an expensive education for an actual understanding of the world.”
He says he would like a minimum level of support from her: “I’m not asking for the full Norma Major.”
Diana berates her husband for not reading a novel: “When did you last read a novel?”
When he points out “I read that Jeffrey Archer over Easter,” she responds dismissively, “Jeffrey Archer doesn’t count.”
It so happened that on the night I went, Lord Archer was in the audience, having that very day released his latest novel, Nothing Ventured. In fact, we chatted for a while. Charming man, and one of the most successful authors in the world. There’s nothing to be snide about.
Diana suggests that Robin should distribute Margaret Drabble or Doris Lessing to his ministerial colleagues, “even slip Virginia Woolf into Margaret’s box. That’ll shake her up. Take Margaret to Hedda Gabbler – could change the whole course of British history.”
He has had enough: “These liberal-arts people, with their jumpers and their beards and their profound moments of epiphany, who don’t have a clue about running the country, and yet somehow because they’ve read the latest Ian McKellan novel, they think they can look down on those of us who are doing these appalling, oppressive things like worrying about employment figures and exchange rates and whether the pension funds have any bloody money in them!”
Robin sneers at his wife: “You’ve been at the Guardian again, haven’t you? It’s why I keep telling them in the village shop not to sell it to you. Terrifying combination of righteous indignation and typographical inaccuracy.”
Truce is declared when husband and wife finally confront the truth about their son, but that is a spoiler and should not be given away.
Hansard is the National’s Lyttelton theatre, London, until November 25.
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Aamir Khan embracing vintage looks with classic charmgetty images
Bold and dramatic changes defining Aamir Khan’s careergetty images
From rugged to refined Aamir Khan’s versatile appearancesgetty images
Memorable film moments showcasing Aamir Khan’s unique stylegetty images
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A seated Jain enlightened teacherAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Ganesha from JavaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
A Chinese silk painting depicting the BuddhaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
ArdhanarishvaraAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Head of a grimacing yakshaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
NagaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The Bimaran casketAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Hunia Chawla
A still from rehearsal
Them performing liveNajmuddin Saifuddin Qawwal Group
The cast of Marriage Material in key moments from the play, including Avita Jay, Kiran Landa, Omar Malik, Irfan Shamji and Anoushka Deshmukh
Sathnam Sanghera’s 'Marriage Material' adapted into bold new play on conformity
The play Marriage Material at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera’s novel of the same name, which first came out in 2013.
She is lucky to have Iqbal Khan direct Marriage Material. The play, a co-production with the Birmingham Rep, is set in the late 1960s. Mr and Mrs Bains (played by Jaz Singh Deol and Avita Jay) run a corner shop in Wolverhampton. Their younger daughter, Surinder (Anoushka Deshmukh), is 16, her sister Kamaljit (Kiran Landa) is just a bit older.
They have a neighbour, Patwant Dhanda (Irfan Shamji), who, as we shall soon see, is not a very pleasant man. In fact, he comes across just as racist as Enoch Powell, who represented Wolverhampton South West for the Tories from 1950 to 1974.
It will be recalled this was a time when Sikhs working on the buses were told they couldn’t wear a turban. That was a hard-fought battle that had to be won.
The Bains, meanwhile, simply want to get their girls married off.
Nothing new here, I thought.
What makes the tale different is that the plot twists and turns down the generations. Mr Dhanda, who has the makings of a paedophile, makes a pitch for one of the girls when Mr Bains dies early in the play. “A life with no man in the house is no life,” he informs the newly widowed Mrs Bains.
Mr Dhanda has a wife but she has returned to India so he considers himself to be a free man.
Surinder’s English teacher from school, Miss Flanagan (Celeste Dodwell), who is also head of the fifth form, tells Mrs Bains about her daughter: “I don’t want to embarrass you, but she is bright. Ridiculously bright.”
She adds: “Mrs Bains, I think it would be a pity if Surinder didn’t stay on at school.” The initial response from Mrs Bains is not encouraging: “Too much education makes people’s brains get mixed up, they don’t sleep at night…”
But she is finally persuaded that Surinder should be allowed to stay on for a while longer before being married off.
Mr Bains was very old school. When Surinder confides she would one day like to be “a somebody”, he is amused that “my daughter wants to be a somebody”.
“Like you,” she tells her father.
Mr Bains consoles his daughter: “We will find a somebody for you to marry.”
At the point of a possible marriage, however, Surinder is sweet-talked by chocolate salesman Jim Wilson (Tommy Belshaw) into running away with him. They share a love of literature, and he calls her “Sue Bains”. But the relationship does not end well.
Once she has left, Surinder is written off as “dead” by her family. The story that is circulated is that she was only 16 when she was killed in a car crash. That’s better than to let on that she ran off with a white man.
By the time she is reconciled with her sister towards the end of the play, a great deal has changed. Kamaljit married Tanvir Banga (Omar Malik), a young man who helped out in the Bains’ corner shop. When the two sisters meet again, Tanvir has also died. But he and Kamaljit had a son, Arjan Banga (Jaz Singh Deol doubles up for this role after the death of Mr Bains). He has come home after his father’s death to help his mother who is still running the family corner shop.
Meanwhile, Mr Dhanda’s business has prospered. He now has a son, Ranjit Dhanda (the role is taken by Omar Malik after Tanvir’s death), and he is nearly as unpleasant as his father.
Arjan has an English fiancée, Claire (Celeste Dodwell). In London, Arjan worked as a creative director. But after deciding to stay in Wolverhampton to help his mother, he decides he cannot marry Claire because she is white. In other words, Asians are not free of racism, either. Happily, at the end, the couple are reconciled.
As for Surinder, she parted company with Jim Wilson after realising he was all talk, depended on her for money and had failed to earn a penny from his literary pretensions. She had prospered, though, as a hotel owner and had been transformed in time into a well-groomed businesswoman. After being tracked down by Arjan, she decides to return to her roots in Wolverhampton and help Kamaljit run the family corner shop. Perhaps 50 years had passed during the passage of the play.
Being subjected to racism turned some Asians into racists themselves. The word goreh (white person) is repeatedly spat out with venom. Maybe it is worth remembering the play’s audience isn’t exclusively Asian – white folk are watching as well. And maybe some of the toilet humour ridiculing white people, which always makes me cringe, could be cut out.
In Sanghera’s novel, there is a quote from Enoch Powell’s speech in November 1968: “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact, he is a west Indian or an Asian still... he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one. Time is running out against us and them. With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the US.”
In Marriage Material, where the acting is marvellous (apart from Mr Dhanda’s Indian mannerisms and accent being overdone) we do travel across a couple of generations.
There is a scene when Tanvir rejects Mr Dhanda’s vision of creating a little Punjab in Wolverhampton.
Mr Dhanda wants to take over the Bains’ corner shop and is putting pressure on Tanvir to sign the papers. He says: “In this country, money is the path to freedom.”
“Sign, please,” he instructs Tanvir. “We must make sure our children learn to behave nicely, according to our rules.”
He insists: “We maintain our identity so we can be ourselves.”
Tanvir disagrees: “We can be us here. With the goreh.”
Dhanda warns him: “Then we will be inviting chaos.”
Tanvir’s comment is telling: “You sound like Enoch.”
Kamaljit, who is expecting a baby with her husband Tanvir, says: “I would like my child to grow up knowing the history of the Gurus and to read the Granth Sahib. And to love their culture.”
Tanvir tells his wife: “I would like my child to go to the finest schools, to cheer for England in the World Cup and eat Yorkshire pudding on a Sunday.”
Kamaljit sets out a dream that has perhaps come to pass with many third and fourth generation British Asians: “Maybe our child can do both.” Much, much later, in a throwback to the past, we learn of Surinder’s O-level results: “Biology A, Chemistry A, English Language A, English Literature A, French A, History B, Latin A, Mathematics A, Physics A…”
Kamaljit tells her younger sister: “Never mind about the B.”
And that is quintessentially Asian. Their acting is outstanding.
Marriage Material is at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre until June 21, and at the Birmingham Rep from June 25-July 5