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Blood and votes
How do you turn the Blair era into Jacobean revenge tragedy, Fiachra Gibbons asks poet-turned-playwright Sean O'Brien
"Watch it. Oh we're hard because we're hard
Because by being hard we're being kind.
Because one day a world ago
The Leader read a book and lost his mind"
- Jacky Jackson, home secretary
The morning the massed revolutionary ranks of the Women's Institute humbled the Great Leader, the final chapter in his demise was being played out in a rehearsal room in Newcastle. It is the summer of 2004, and New Labour is facing certain electoral defeat. The "project", whatever that was, is long forgotten. Survival is all that matters now. Prime minister Richard Tallow, "in a nod towards tradition", retreats to Whitley Bay to make his conference plea for four more years.
The TV news reports how "The PM spoke of struggling for the souls/ Of the excluded and the rich alike./ Equipped with nothing but a mike," while his home secretary, Jacky Jackson, a rebel in his youth - who is "hard as fuck on evil nowadays/Since that's the only policy that plays/Down where the Morlocks read the Daily Mail" - mutters at the screen in his hotel room. "So no one really wondered what this shit meant./After ideology comes noise/So, on the count of three, then, girls and boys."
Had it been about any other sub ject, Laughter When We're Dead is the sort of play that would give David Blunkett multiple orgasms. It's a Jacobean revenge tragedy that Webster would have been proud of, written in iambic pentameters and rhyming couplets. Traditional values in a modern setting, precisely the worthy-sounding roughage on which to blunt young minds. But as you may have guessed, Laughter When We're Dead won't be making the school syllabus, not for a while anyway.
It is not so much the home secretary's appetite for snack sex that is likely to keep it off, or that he prefers football to Daisy Gates, his fragrant and willing PPS - "Later. I've got tickets for the match/But then I'll drink ambrosia from your snatch." No, this is the first piece of drama, and arguably the first piece of writing, really to get under the skin of the government.
Last month Trevor Nunn, the director of the National Theatre, complained that no one was prepared to take on the big state-of-the-nation plays. He should get himself up to Newcastle quick and beg an introduction to Sean O'Brien. Where all those revues churned out by the usual suspects of superannuated establishment dissidents joke unfunnily about the nothingness within New Labour, here it scares the hell out of you. But the most dangerous thing of all about Laughter When We're Dead is that it's entertainment. This is the last thing you might expect from a verse play, had it not come from O'Brien or through Live Theatre, the Newcastle stable from which sprang Peter Flannery (Our Friends in the North) and Lee Hall (Spoonface Steinberg and Cooking With Elvis).
Poets are not supposed to rattle governments, even those like O'Brien whose hefty physical presence seems ideally suited to rocking the pillars of the temple. His verse, which has won him the Forward and every other paltry prize that keeps poets off the streets, is just as muscular. You can hear its strength and his trademark dactyls in the work of the many younger poets he has influenced.
Still, O'Brien is an unlikely nemesis. He's no firebrand class warrior ("Private school and Oxford, actually") nor Old Labour nostalgic either. It's a hatred of cant that drove him towards drama. "The intellectual impoverishment of politics in this country is shameful, and it is getting worse. It's all gesture and no policy or real analysis," he says. "I was standing at the bus stop this morning in what happens to be Stephen Byers's constituency thinking he may as well be on the moon for all he has to do with my life, or anyone else's who lives here. Despite Gordon Brown's occasional railings against upper middle-class bias at Oxford and Cambridge, it's there in politics too. What we now have in this country is a permanent political class, a caste even - and I am not just talking about political advisors here - who owe no allegiance to anyone, least of all the people who voted them in.
"You get curious reversals of normal polarities in such circumstances. You get Blair going to address the WI, and getting himself heckled by the most well-behaved people outside the synod of the Church of England. He thinks they are all mugs. They know he thinks they are all mugs and they are not having it any more."
At the heart of O'Brien's play is the tragedy of the wayward, increasingly reactionary Jackson and his wife Elizabeth, a human rights lawyer, who has sacrificed her own happiness for his and the party's sake. "A partnership of principle outlives/Mere human error: partnership forgives," she says.
"Jackson is like many in New Labour who started out on the left but who have travelled a long way since," says O'Brien. "As distinctions of left and right have collapsed, no one knows why they are doing it anymore. So staying in power becomes the only objective. When Elizabeth tells him it's a wonder he's not bugging people's dreams, he jokes back that that's the 'first among my post-election schemes'."
Jackson's real agony is that he once believed in something better, but now no longer can. All that's left is what O'Brien calls the "Stalinist instincts you'll find in many old left-wingers". And so when one of his constituents mistakes him for a Tyne Tees weatherman during the fateful night of his return to the Toon, Jackson vents his frustration on the "Neds" who blindly vote in him:
"You're old, you're pissed, you're ignorant, you're poor,
The son of a dole-wallah and a hoor.
I've spent my lifetime hoping for the best
From twats like you. You've failed the fuckin' test"
O'Brien said he was attracted to Jacobean revenge tragedy by its atmosphere of corruption and repression. The internal politics of New Labour, he says, is essentially the politics of the medieval court, where the spin-doctor courtiers pull all the strings.
"We have had effectively one-party rule here locally in the north for a long time. Newcastle has had a reputation in the past for corruption. As with anywhere else, when there's money to be made, you can be sure there will be people willing to take the opportunity. I wanted to set it against that kind of backdrop just when everything is coming apart at the seams, as they will eventually."
Director Max Roberts, who has already brought Cooking With Elvis to the West End this year from his small theatre in the shadow of the Tyne bridge, said Laughter When We're Dead demands a national audi ence. "It may be written in iambic pentameters, but it is also written to be seen by a lot of people. It's a great story. Like Flannery's work it is not just for the bourgeois radical elite. When was the last time you went to the National and saw a play about Liverpool or Newcastle or Glasgow that spoke to the whole nation? I don't want to sound like a bitter northerner, but good plays are universal. Just because they come from the regions doesn't make them any less good."
Laughter When We're Dead is a staggering piece of poetry. Tonight will decide if it hits the same heights as theatre. But one more thing is sure. For the cabinet, if they can bear to look, it stands as a terrible warning. Whether, like the great jam-maker's revolt, it will be heeded, is another thing.
• Laughter When We're Dead previews from tonight at Live Theatre, Quayside, Newcastle upon Tyne (0191-232 2224). Till June 29.