At some point between the decline of British industry and the vote for Brexit, something happened to class consciousness. Anger once directed at employers was diverted towards those already disfranchised. As Owen Jones wrote last week, we now have a tension between who best gives voice to the working class: Tory vice-chair Lee Anderson, with his rightwing boorishness, or trade unionist Mick Lynch, with his old-school socialism.
It does not help that those attracted to the far right are as likely to be alienated from the middle class as they are from more familiar scapegoats. Left-leaning professionals have become part of the problem as a nation buckles in on itself.
This is the contentious territory into which playwright Anders Lustgarten fearlessly strides in The City and the Town, a title suggesting the schism between the urban elite and the left-behind. It is that old-fashioned thing, a play of ideas, performed on a front-room set designed with attention to detail by Hannah Sibai, in which two estranged brothers meet for the first time in 13 years.
There is a lot of catching up to do – and enough time has elapsed for their formerly Labour-voting father to have fallen under the spell of Jordan Peterson and the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
In the first half, Lustgarten tests our patience by withholding information about those intervening years. One character even says, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” But the play comes to life in a second half that crackles with dialectical debate.
Fascinatingly, we are drawn not to Ben (Samuel Collings), whose high-flying legal job has made him a tool in the capitalist machine (shades of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons), but to Magnus (Gareth Watkins), a man with facial tattoos and a prominent role in a paramilitary group. To say he has contradictions is to put it mildly, but he also has a rationale born of experience and compassion. His emotional intelligence second-guesses his brother and brings childhood friend Lyndsey (Amelia Donkor) perilously close to sharing his point of view.
What Dritëro Kasapi’s production lacks in theatricality, the play makes up for in state-of-the-nation urgency.
• At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 25 February. Then touring.
