The bar is offering The Labour, “a refreshing gin-based cocktail with ginger beer”, and The Tory, “a more conservative Rye whiskey based cocktail featuring Campari”. These are unusual offerings for a theatre in Maryland. But it makes sense when you see what is happening on stage just a dozen steps away.
The Olney Theatre Center is hosting the US premiere of Labour of Love, a play about the electoral agonies and ecstasies, and epic ideological struggles, of the British Labour party. Set in a Nottinghamshire constituency office, containing references to Robin Hood and Nottingham Forest football club, and running through names like Clement Attlee, Tony Benn and Neil Kinnock, it is not the most obvious hot ticket in American theatre.
But it opened on Saturday night to plenty of laughs and a rapturous reception. Along with admiring James Graham’s sharply written play – winner of the 2018 Olivier award for best new comedy in the UK – the audience responded to parallels with American politics and, in particular, the battle for the soul of the Democratic party. “It’s hard to be left,” says one character. The Democrats have found that a lot in recent years.
Among those applauding, as a guest of the Guardian, was Jamie Raskin, a left-leaning Democrat who represents Maryland’s eighth congressional district in the US House of Representatives. He says he found the show “spectacular” and “inspiring” ahead of next month’s midterm elections, even if he “was straining to remember the conflict between Healey and the Bennites and who was supposed to be on the left who was on the right”.
In one key speech in Labour of Love, local MP David Lyons complains: “When we go ‘up’ in university towns and cities for the same reasons we’re ‘down’ round here. Lose the ‘heartlands’ for being too soft on immigration, lose the young metropolitans for being too hard. Too radical for the old, too safe for the young. Too soft-Brexit for Leavers, too hard for Remain. Too left, too right, too old, too new … all we seem to do, this party, long as I can remember; soul-searching, introspection. How can we still not know, a hundred years on, who we fucking are and why …”
The lament is likely to strike a chord with Democrats, who are thriving in university towns, especially on the east and west coasts, but who lost traditional “rust belt” heartlands to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race. The party is strong among women, young people and minorities but struggles to make inroads among voters who are strongly religious, favour gun rights and oppose abortion.
“I didn’t know the specific district they were talking about but you can make the same kind of play about the areas that we lost in the 2016 election, like in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania,” Raskin reflected. “Economic de-industrialisation and political disengagement happened in a lot of those places. We’ve got to be honest about the fact that Donald Trump ran to the left of Hillary Clinton on trade policy, on the Iraq war – he constantly attacked her for having voted for it – on political corruption, on her connections to Wall Street and so on.
“Of course it was completely fraudulent on Trump’s part, and the minute he came in he turned the whole administration over to Wall Street and the most rightwing interests in the country. But this last two years has been a period of us trying to clarify the character of American politics for people and to remind people who we are. The Democrats have got to be the fighting progressive populist party.”
Labour of Love deftly dramatises the schism between the centre and the left. The action starts in 2017 and winds backward to 1990; after the interval, it resumes in 1990 and barrels forward to 2017 again. Lyons is in the Blairite mould; his agent, Jean Whittaker, is proud old Labour, grateful for three general election wins but worried that socialist principles have been sacrificed. The pair’s spiky relationship has earned comparisons to Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.
Raskin said: “It was about this secret crush that the left Labour tradition and the centre liberal tradition have on each other. They obviously belong together. We’re not going to be able to win without that. In America I guess most recently our divide was between the Bernie Sanders people and the Hillary Clinton people but we’re not going to win unless we unify progressive populism and liberal feminism. Politics is a game of addition not subtraction and so it’s all about bringing people together and keeping things moving in a humanitarian direction.”
Tony Blair was in power for a decade; Barack Obama for eight years. Both earned praise for what they achieved and criticism for not doing more when they had the chance; for being insufficiently bold and radical. In the American case, Obama’s signature healthcare reform was a prime example. “For me, the Affordable Care Act was imperfect progress,” Raskin said. “It was progress because we gave tens of millions of people health insurance but it was imperfect because it was not universal and there were lots of fateful compromises that were built into it.
“That debate in the play rang true for me because there are those who will attack Obama because he didn’t go with single-payer. Obama did say that if we were starting from scratch, single-payer universal healthcare would be the right way to go, but we’re not starting from scratch and we’ve got this very powerful interest in the private insurance companies and hundreds of thousands of people who work for them. And what are you going to do with that?”
Bill Clinton’s New Democrats were emulated by Tony Blair’s New Labour in the UK, riding a wave of optimism in 1997 after 18 years of Tory rule. The character Lyons insists: “You win from the centre, always … We have a leader who knows that ‘compromise’ is not a dirty word.” But whereas Hillary Clinton saw off the insurgent challenge of Democratic socialist Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, Labour shifted left in 2015 when it elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Images of Sanders and Corbyn feature briefly on TV screens during the production.
What does the centre mean, anyway? Raskin recalls running for the Maryland state senate in 2006, when he was warned that his proposal to legalise gay marriage was unrealistic and made him sound “extreme”. He responded: “It’s not my ambition to be in the political centre, which blows around with the wind. It’s my ambition to be in the moral centre and that’s why I call myself a progressive because I think our job is to find what’s right, the best that we can, and then bring the political centre to us and that’s what makes politics interesting and meaningful.
“So I resonated with Jean when she said if it’s just about finding a mythical centre and taking a poll, you’re going to end up not standing for anything and not moving politics any place. When people say, ‘Pull to the centre’ I’m like, well, part of me agrees with that. I’m a middle child. I like being in the centre. But to me the centre is the moral centre to find what’s right. You start with what’s right. You bring the political centre to you.”
Labour of Love’s transatlantic potential was spotted by Jason Loewith, artistic director of the Olney Theatre Center, who saw it during its London run last year and immediately felt he wanted to stage it before the midterms in America. “The questions that it asks about centrists versus ideologues are being asked by everybody right now, whether you’re on the right or the left,” he said. “So it just felt absolutely time. The echoes couldn’t be clearer to me.”
He added: “We’re still looking at this split of the Democratic party, which became even more pronounced in the months after the election when you look at somebody like Bernie Sanders versus someone like Hillary Clinton and how that struggle has played out. You look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her incredible victory [in a Democratic House primary] in New York and you are hearing all kinds of folks in the Democratic establishment wringing their hands and wondering, is it going to be this super-ideological blue wave and are people like her essentially going to be able to win?
“How much is replicable from one constituency to another is the question on everybody’s mind. It doesn’t even matter, Republican or Democrat: the question seems to be the same on both sides. Donald Trump’s election was our Brexit moment, of seeing the centre maybe isn’t going to hold in a progressive liberal way as we thought. I think people are going to find the parallels extremely surprising.”
Labour of Love will be on at the Olney Theatre Center until 28 October
