It is 2002 in an East European country where top American political strategist Rachel and British data analyst Caro have been recruited to help pro-Western reformer Liudmilla Bezborodko win the Presidential election against the corrupt incumbent and his Moscow-controlled campaign director.
Sites for opposition rallies are mysteriously closed, bogus parties are created to misdirect votes, an investigative journalist is killed. But the people have had enough, the vote becomes a referendum on criminal autocracy and, against the odds, the good guys win.
Fast-forward eight years: minor scandals have dulled the lustre of the Sunflower Revolution and the new prosperity, ‘casino capitalism’, enjoyed by the urban, liberal elite is not shared by those left behind. It takes Caro, using an example from the UK, to articulate the issue. In a focus group, Voter One wanted nationalisation, state aid and pensions, Voter Two railed against immigration and gay rights. The point, she says, is that they were the same person.
A similar lesson is learnt by Rachel’s estranged, former business partner Larry, who now coaches Bezborodko’s successful challenger, the former dissident Petr Lutsevic, whose newly-adopted right-wing policies soon include the country’s first LGBT-free zone. Populism is ascendant.
The Slavic country is unnamed. The locals in fact speak Bulgarian, but there are closer parallels elsewhere, with Serbia, Slovakia, Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Ukraine. And on the other side of the Atlantic too. The political lessons of the West have been returned with a vengeance, playwright David Edgar seems to say.
At two hours 45 minutes, the piece is perhaps 15 minutes too long, and I feel the influence of these strategists in determining political programmes is somewhat overstated—neither Bezborodko nor Lutsevic seem to have a policy of their own.
But the writing is vigorous, the situations taut in this loftily ambitious work. The text is so densely-packed with issues relevant today that after the show, a small queue formed of those wanting to buy a copy to go through it again.
The cast are all first-class. Martina Laird and Lloyd Owen as Rachel and Larry put me right in the middle of their feisty debates about tactics and ethics, cut through by Jodie McNee’s Caro, the only character who seems genuinely to care about, while disagreeing with, the neglected constituency of the marginalised.
Carrying the momentum of change are Patrycja Kujawska, as Bezborodko, easily mistaken at first for a cleaner, rising to President before elegant exile (and bearing a striking resemblance to Ukraine’s former president Yulia Timoshenko), and Roderick Hill as Lutsevic, transformed from woolly-minded idealist to narrow-minded demagogue.
The play is performed on a transverse stage between banks of rather uncomfortable seats, with large video screens mounted high above, upon which are projected political events from the Second World War onwards. Seats are unreserved and, to avoid a stiff neck, I would recommend sitting in the centre of either upstairs gallery.