For its final production before temporary closure, the Leicester Haymarket has chosen to stage a 90-minute political satire by Tariq Ali. While it is always refreshing to find a writer having a go at the government, Ali's visceral hatred of New Labour does not allow much room for discussion or debate.
Ali's premise is that the home secretary - in this case, the knighted son of a Trinidadian factory worker - has been found dead on his sofa. But since his wife, Desdemona, confesses straight away to the Metropolitan commissioner of police that she murdered her husband, there is not much in the way of narrative suspense. And since she pleads justifiable homicide on the grounds that her husband symbolised New Labour's venal, self-serving neo-Thatcherism, there is little intellectual suspense either. All you are left with is a fitfully amusing catalogue of Labour's manifold sins.
Once or twice Ali hits his target: in particular, the double standard that allows elected politicians to carry out a pre-emptive military strike that would be condemned if they were unelected. Dramatically, however, the play suffers from the lack of any real counterweight to Desdemona's political passion.
And Ali's arguments are notably selective. His perfectly legitimate attack on our voyeuristic, celebrity culture ignores the fact that this long predates Labour's election. When Desdemona suggests that her husband initially believed Labour would roll back the Thatcherite counter-revolution, you feel that he can't have read the 1997 manifesto too closely.
I am quite prepared to accept the far-fetched premise of Ali's play (although I suspect that the murder of a cabinet minister, no matter how carefully covered up, might attract some media attention). What is harder to swallow is the naive assumption that the labour movement, having used "that shit, Blair" to win the election, would reassert control. One is left with a play more remarkable for its blanket hatred than its dramatic skill. And, although Iqbal Khan's production contains engaging performances from Kristin Milward as the unrepentant killer and Russell Dixon as the panic-stricken cop, you can't help feeling that Ali, confronted by an open goal, has scored about as often as Iain Duncan Smith at Question Time.
· Until June 21. Box office: 0116-253 9797.
