Plays don't come any more topical than Speechless, now on a late-night run at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. The scene is set: the Prime Minister, only a year out from an election triumph, is in deep trouble, pressured by the media, and many of his colleagues, including a restive Chancellor, to leave his office. Lest any particularly dense member of the audience should miss the parallels, the walls of the office in which all of the action is set is decorated with cuttings from the latest scandals.
Speechless begins with the government's star speechwriter, Myra MacDonald (Suzanne Harbison), being given the job of drafting a speech for a desperate, surprise move, a snap election, by her putative boss, the slimy Charles Bannerman (Paul Cassidy).
Unlike his real-life (now shipped off to Brussels) parallel, Bannerman is definitely heterosexual, in a shirt-unbuttoned-to-show-chest-hair way. But it is not his sleaziness, or the fact that his pass is an obvious attempt to respond a taunt that his wife is sleeping with the Chancellor, that causes Myra to reject his advances. Any classy, high-powered woman like her would. But, it soon emerges, she has more reason than that.
It is a promising scenario, and the play benefits from Harbison's strong stage presence. She powerfully conveys the depths of her disillusionment with the souring of the Labour dream, and conveys the further reason for her reluctance to respond to her boss's clumsy pass — that she has been sleeping with the PM — in a subtle, classy way, long before the script reveals the fact.
Cassidy too is solid enough. If the one-dimensional character or Bannerman gives him little to work with, he does a nice job of making the romantic Albanian coffee-boy Giorgio sympathetic, and an interesting job with his role as another interloper in the office, Myra's newly acquired bit-on-the-side, and drug dealer, Sean.
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