In the 21st century, strategists help candidates shape their campaigns by finding out what voters really, really want. Methods may change over time, but fundamental means and aims remain the same. In this sense, “the new real” of David Edgar’s title is the same as the old real and the most important question is still the hardest to answer. Who really benefits from the election: ordinary people, or only power players and brokers?
A pair of American consultants – Larry and Rachel, once a team, now in ideological conflict – become involved in the national elections of a country formerly under Soviet influence when Liudmilla, campaign manager for Petr, approaches them. Will they help her candidate, struggling against the undercover operations of their powerful neighbour?
The strength of this, Edgar’s fourth play to be set in an imaginary eastern European state, is that it explores the question from a range of shifting angles and offers no easy answers. The weakness is that it rapidly seesaws through its cleverly contrived parallel situations, which span two decades from 2002, at such a lick that the phrase “keep up at the back” keeps echoing through my head. We hurtle through: suspect elections, “sunflower revolution”, disillusion, subsequent elections, culture wars, Eurovision, strategic changes from focus-group research to social-media scraping (side view on Brexit).
A final set of elections is won by the candidate who follows the logic of the consultants’ identification of two main groups: “people from somewhere” and “people from anywhere” demographic classifications, which leads them to an appalling, ancient racial trope – and to victory.
Holly Race Roughan’s direction flows the action swiftly across the traverse stage; it also encourages an energetic overemphasis in delivery of dialogue that detracts from subtleties of the multifaceted characterisations. Edgar’s writing feels as if it would be better suited to a West Wing-style TV treatment, offering viewers breathing space and layers of information via sound and visual cues (attempted, here, with images projected on screens hanging above the stage; these overcrowd the action, rather than amplify it).
In the nine-strong cast, Lloyd Owen and Martina Laird are entertainingly combative as Larry and Rachel; Jodie McNee’s Yorkshire researcher is their amusingly phlegmatic counterpoint. Patrycja Kujawska’s ambitious Liudmilla develops convincingly into a political leader. Most striking, though, is Roderick Hill’s chilling transformation of Petr from unelectable former dissident to populist dictator-in-the making.
• The New Real is at the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 2 November
