A man too pure for politics given an unexpected leadership role. A Tory government drafting as its patsy a politician unschooled in the compromises of power. Until the stage addresses the stories of Corbyn and Clegg directly, we’ll just have to make do with Harley Granville Barker’s Waste, the first National Theatre production of which opens on 10 November.
“There are so many topical parallels,” says Olivia Williams, who stars. But this Edwardian classic isn’t only a timeless drama of idealism v realpolitik. It’s also the tale of a lurid sex scandal that destroys two lives – and one in which a woman’s story drives the plot. “I can’t tell you how rare that is,” says Williams. “There’s the Bechdel test, which highlights where two women in a scene don’t talk about a man. But the acid test for me is, ‘Can this plot proceed without my character?’ And this one couldn’t.”
The character in question is Amy O’Donnell, “a charming woman, who takes care she does charm”, as Barker writes in his entertaining stage directions. Orphaned, raised to believe “the whole duty of a woman is to be pretty”, and now fancy free on the high-society party circuit, Amy falls in love with (and proves the downfall of) the play’s upstanding antihero Henry Trebell. When director Roger Michell offered her the part – she had starred as Eleanor Roosevelt in his 2012 film Hyde Park on Hudson – Williams couldn’t say yes quickly enough.
“I’ve never been cast as a ‘silly little woman’, a waif,” she says, “because of assumptions about my education and the way I speak.” You’re far more likely to find her as, say, Jane Austen in the 2008 TV hit Miss Austen Regrets, or as the Cherie Blair proxy in Roman Polanski’s political drama The Ghost. “I’ve played a lot of earnest bluestockings, and now I’ve got some lacy pink stockings,” she says with relish.
Not that Amy can be reduced to silliness, or stockings. In fact, the character is a welter of contradictions. “She’s this strange combination: a woman who functions on the promise of sex but is utterly repulsed by sexuality. She has ambitions outside the sphere she was put into. But her levels of physical self-loathing are unbearable.” She’s a mess, isn’t she? “And God love her for that,” Williams says, laughing, “because actresses love to play people who’re a mess!”
We’re talking hours before Waste’s first preview. The previous night, Williams brought her two children, aged 11 and eight, to the dress rehearsal. It must have been quite an eye-opener, watching mum play a woman who opts for a potentially fatal backstreet abortion over the horrifying prospect of motherhood. This is the plot detail, officially at least, that got Waste banned by the Lord Chamberlain in 1907. Barker’s intimate depiction of double-dealing and cover-ups in the corridors of power probably contributed.
The authenticity of those scenes has scarcely dimmed: Michell recently claimed that our current ruling class “would see plenty of themselves” in the play. Williams agrees. “As with Jeremy Corbyn, this is about the ideologue v the practical man. I was raised at a time” – Williams is 47 – “when people still said, ‘I have this philosophy of what would make society great. Are you with me or not?’ Nowadays, they just ask, ‘What do I have to say to make people vote for me?’ I find that profoundly depressing.”
But doesn’t Waste suggest idealism is doomed to political failure? “Neil Kinnock came to talk to us about the play and politics,” Williams recalls. “And he said, ‘Ideologues are impossible to deal with. They ruin everything when you’re trying to get something done’.” If Kinnock, and Barker, are sceptical of dogma, Williams is keeping the faith. “I honestly don’t know what I think about Corbyn. But I’ve always been a fan of the Benns and the Livingstones: the people who had a principle that they stuck to.”
Waste is also about women’s rights, which throws into relief the progress made since the play was updated in 1927 – its first public staging wasn’t for a further nine years – and its precariousness. “The female characters each state, in their own way, that you can only function through a man.” At least, says Williams, “in our very tiny slice of society,” women in the British middle classes are able to act entirely independently of men. “The play makes me wake up every morning and thank whatever higher being you believe in that that’s the case.”
Williams is also thanking higher beings, with some reservations, for her current job security. Waste runs until March, and after that she’s holding out for a third series of her acclaimed American TV show Manhattan, which dramatises the development of the first atomic bomb. “Tragically,” she says, “it doesn’t come to the UK – so nobody here knows I’ve been doing it.”
Williams has been solidly successful on stage and screen since her 1997 break in Kevin Costner’s The Postman, but is used to “every three or four months, going into a frantic, dog-chasing-its-tail dance of trying to get another job” she says. “And now I’m in the most stable period of my career. Which is scary. I’m used to packing my bags at short notice and going off somewhere. And if that doesn’t happen, I do get antsy, and think, ‘Isn’t it time I was at Heathrow?’”
• Waste is at the National Theatre, London, until 19 March. Box office: 020-7452 3000
