FringeReview UK 2024
The Promise
Chichester Festival Theatre
Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Chichester Minerva Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“Enjoy it, boyo, this may be your last meal if Britain is bankrupt.” After Tim Price’s Nye, and Lucy Kirkwood’s Human Bodies, Paul Unwin’s The Promise – directed by Jonathan Kent at Chichester’s Minerva till August 17th – proclaims itself as the third of an accidental NHS trilogy.
Clare Burt’s Wilkinson, racking asthmatically across the play, is indelible, crowning the evening in an arc of sacrifice. Essential theatre-going, an education.
Director Jonathan Kent, Set Designer Joanna Parker, Costume Designer & Supervisor Deborah Andrews, Lighting and Video Designer Peter Mumford, Composer Gary Yershon, Sound Designer Christopher Shutt
Casting Director Annelie Powell CDG, Dramaturg Harry Mackrill, Choreographer Jack Murphy, Associate Set Designer Christophe Eynde, Assistant Director Sydney Stevenson, Production Manager Matt Ledbury, Wigs, Hair Make-Up Campbell Young Associates, Props Supervisor Fahmida Bakht
Company Stage Manager Alison Rankin, Deputy Stage Manager Caitlin Shay, Assistant Stage Manager Emily Humphrys
Till August 17th
Review
“Enjoy it, boyo, this may be your last meal if Britain is bankrupt.” After Tim Price’s Nye, and Lucy Kirkwood’s Human Bodies, Paul Unwin’s The Promise – directed by Jonathan Kent at Chichester’s Minerva till August 17th – proclaims itself as the third of an accidental NHS trilogy.
Despite the poster, that’s stretching things in a drama heightened post-Election with bleatings of bankruptcy (“Countries do not go bankrupt” declares bullish Ernie Bevin here, whose joke above is nicely self-contradicting). Unwin has the current Labour party in his sights.
Certainly The Promise is a frequently riveting take on how Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government faced reconstruction. This is primarily a cabinet play and confrontations there are thrilling, indeed enlightening. This work though only glancingly deals with the NHS; Nye Bevan isn’t the central character.
That’s ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson (Clare Burt bestriding scenes like a comet). Burt appears sprawled on a bed, then apparates somewhere above stage-right in a fiery speech at Labour Conference Blackpool: demanding an end to the wartime coalition. It is effectively Wilkinson’s play: Unwin’s skewing it towards the NHS seems shoehorning for its 75th.
Unwin’s not alone: all three NHS-foundational plays have proved tricky to realise. Human Bodies is a fiction given a group hug by history; Price’s Nye was developed with director Rufus Norris over ten years. Unwin’s might have benefitted from longer development too.
Kent discards some tiny roles (actor count is still high) and muted a conscious symmetry in the opening and close; which independently paralleled Nye, for different reasons.
Despite this, structure proves elusive. Ranging from May 1945-February 1947 Unwin’s often best in No. 10’s cabinet room. Personal corridors leading off throw sidelights: occasionally a door slams and you wonder why it was wandered down.
Wilkinson is though the centrifuge. Her life is far too little known. Here, Unwin treats not of her own Education portfolio (one she revolutionised) but her role in shifting alliances that pushed Bevan’s NHS.
Burt dominates, her performance matched by others in a cast who breathe life into war-exhausted Whitehall. One corrupted by bananas, consultants bribing with black market restaurants.
Unwin excavates collegiate decisions more intriguingly than the visionary in Price’s Nye. Here fallible idealist Bevan (an excellent Richard Harrington) like Wilkinson, wants Attlee gone, despite his surprise appointment. Harrington swerves from fiery to baulked. It’s revelatory.
Herbert Morrison (Reece Dinsdale, affable, serpentine) is Attlee’s would-be usurper and Wilkinson’s lover. Traditionally Machiavellian, Peter Mandelson‘s grandfather is given a slippery measure of humanity. Though ‘centrist’ he champions Maynard Keynes’ argument: borrow to invest and stimulate the economy.
Dinsdale’s Morrison cajoles and tries it on with Burt’s Wilkinson, providing the one intimate connection of the evening. Dinsdale registers surprise, swirled out of Wilkinson’s orbit, as their alliance fizzles from in-cabinet put-downs to taunting compromises.
Clement Attlee (Andrew Woodall) though is fatally underestimated. In touch with suffering, he’s yet remote from it. Woodall, strong on frosty dismissals (as in The Other Boleyn Girl here in April) here pivots on authority, demanding Nye address him as “Prime Minister”. His Attlee faces Morrison down.
Attlee’s relationship with Tory-ish wife Violet is a revelation. Suzanne Burden emerges from Violet’s chrysalis to assert boundaries and humanity.
Former union leader, reluctant Foreign Secretary (proving disastrously abrasive) Somerset burring Ernie Bevin is the surprise, ferociously loyal to Attlee. Clive Wood burls with one-liners, both unexpected ally to radicals like Bevan and Wilkinson, and inquisitor.
That follows Attlee’s illness, with another coup in the air. The surprise is to see who comes badly out of it.
Nye’s hinterland is dominated by his wife the great Jennie Lee (Alison McKenzie) whose career blossomed after he died in 1960. McKenzie’s highpoint comes where Lee realises Wilkinson is going too far in her oration to the dead.
It would have been fascinating to see McKenzie in scenes alone with Burt and indeed Burden.
When Miles Richardson arrives as Chancellor Hugh Dalton, taking a biscuit, removing a hip-flask or arching in a patrician roar, he raises every scene he’s in: one reason cabinet scenes go so well with overlapping dialogue Kent coaxes from the text. It’s a magnetic performance.
Ailing vegetarian Board of Trade Minister Richard Stafford-Cripps (Peter Hamilton Dyer) provides a lower-voltage acuity, but in Dyer’s hands raises his jabbing inquisitorial glare to an art-form.
Bevan’s “promise” faces potential nemeses, one proving President of the Royal College Lord Moran, familiarly Charlie Wilson (David Robb). He fingers Bevan’s rising sartorial splendour: shorthand for champagne socialism, a touch of the Morrisons. Robb’s patrician cut-through (his characteristic voice frequently on BBC Radio drama) sneers disdain.
Unwin’s fictive characters are undernourished. Labour worker Joan Vincent (Felixe Forde) and admirer Thomas Merriman (Majid Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy, also Photographer) deliver appealing performances. Since Forde’s character hangs around the cabinet, you feel a leak or confidence might be taken further.
What Churchill (Martyn Ellis) is doing might remind us Unwin wrote The Enfield Haunting – as well as co-creating Casualty. Ellis relishes twists in Churchill’s avuncular speech. Quite what he’s doing when he’s doing it skews the work to The Churchill Haunting. Differently conceived it could work.
Burt’s Wilkinson though, racking asthmatically across the play’s two hours 25, is indelible, crowning the evening in an arc of sacrifice. “I don’t want to be remembered. I want to make a difference.” Surely a play straining to be about Wilkinson was thwarted with bandwagon anniversaries.
Joanna Parker, whose sets in The Other Boleyn Girl were stupefying, offers shining floorboards where beds and cabinet table and chairs whoosh on and off. The backwall with doors serves as period black-and-white video projection as part of Peter Mumford’s lighting. Christopher Shutt’s sound is occasionally loud but idiomatic, and Gary Yershon’s music refines from Pathé-style upbeat to instrumental forces close to Eugene Goossens’ chamber music.
The Promise can seem episodic rather than consistently dramatic. Tremendous scenes, superb performances – above all Burt’s and Richardson’s – make this mostly persuasive, indeed essential.
Unwin is sovereign on showing how Nye’s compromises with consultants and pharmaceuticals create fault-lines others see; which we inherit as fissures tearing the NHS apart. In this, Unwin surpasses Price’s brilliantly theatrical Nye in analysing collective decision-making, compromise and consequences.
45 Labour MPs defied the 1945 government, voting against the radical King’s Speech. They were no more suspended from the whip than the 199 who voted against Blair’s Iraq war in 2003. Unwin, who admonishes present-day Labour with its heroic past, might be tempted to add that detail in a revival. Essential theatre-going, and caveats aside, an education.
