When Hamilton made the transition to London, some naysayers thought that the musical wouldn’t play as well on the other side of the pond because of its U.S.-centric political story and its celebration of America. Considering it is selling out nightly and on its way to one of London’s biggest hits ever, that thinking was obviously incorrect.
Olney Theatre Center is trying something similar, bringing a hot West End-based comedy based on the British political climate to its stage. Labour of Love, the winner of this year’s Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, follows the ups and downs of left-wing British politics over almost three decades. It is making its American debut at Olney through Oct. 28.
Labour of Love follows the life of Labour party MP David Lyons, who feels the road to power lies in claiming the moderate center; while Jean, his left wing constituency manager, insists that the best way to affect the most good is by staying true to principles.
While the play begins in 2017 detailing his run at Parliament, it soon shifts 27 years earlier on the very day Lyons is first elected. The play then journeys back to the future, year by year, and we see the duo’s verbal tête-à-têtes and political arguments unfold through the years.
Written by playwright James Graham, the comedy will be directed by Leora Morris, who believes the show will is well suited for the U.S. audience.
“It’s unavoidable to see the U.S. and the left in the U.S.’s challenges alive in what’s going on in the play,” she says. “We’ve been in conversation with James, who has been really generous, and we made some tiny changes—we took out a reference to a local politician and we cut some of the jargony British politician stuff, but very little. What’s so exciting about this play being about a system of government alien to us, we don’t enter it with all of our unconscious biases.”
Therefore, the director notes, the audience can watch the comedy, not pre-judging anything. And just as Shakespeare set plays in Italy often, the distance is productive because it allows for more openness and more curiosity.
A 2018 O’Neill/NNPN National Directors Fellowship Director in Residence, Morris recently worked at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre as the Yale Directing Fellow. She received her MFA in Directing from the Yale School of Drama where she also served as co-artistic director of Yale Cabaret.
When Olney’s Artistic Director Jason Loewith first reached out to Morris about directing the play, she admits she hadn’t heard of it.
“As soon as he described it to me as being about the predicament of the inability of the left to unite enough to get power and the question of a centrist government that has power and a purest leftist opposition, I thought this was a great response to the 2016 election and a great piece to do right before the 2018 midterms,” Morris says. “I read the play and it was utterly masterful in the way James Graham uses this miracle instructor who drops into the lives of these people for 27 years and lets every moment of history be itself and change in its context of moving backwards or forwards, and how are perspectives on them shift.”
What’s more, Graham gets this message out through two compelling, stubborn, loveable, and charming 3-dimensional humans, managing to express what could be a very heavy intellectual debate through their humanity.
“It feels like a guilty pleasure watching it in rehearsal. I keep describing it as West Wing meets Monty Python,” Morris says. “What’s so brilliant about that is that it lets us investigate politics through people and how it affects people’s personal lives.”
After her first read, Morris had a whiff of all of this insight and the more she worked on it, the more she felt an admiration for Graham’s writing and the play.
[adsanity_rotating align=”aligncenter” time=”10″ group_id=”1455″ /]
“The acting company was really devoted in immersing themselves in the detail of the political landscape that they are trafficking in,” Morris says. “Julia talked on the first day about how she had a reaction in her physical body when she hears a specific politician speak, so when Thatcher resigns or Blair wins, those abstract ideas and people moving up and down in power, she wanted to have a sense on how Jean would react to that. They ultimately all wanted to become Brits in their investment in the circumstances.”
That meant a ton of research and information for all involved so they could feel solidly familiar with the political landscape over the five-different time periods the play inhabits.
“Taking all of that intellectual richness and it becoming second nature, we can then move on to crafting comedy,” Morris says. “The play has everything from whipped cream physical comedy to extremely sophisticated word play. There’s a whole layer of theatrical craft the actors are deploying on top of all of this informational stuff they had to seep in. Watching them continue to work to sharpen the musicality of the play has been incredible.”
Labour of Love is a play that Morris expects will start real, difficult, nuanced conversations about how people vote and what that vote means, and what’s underneath politics.
“I think this play catalizes those conversations through humor and levity and charm in a way that’s necessary,” she says. “It’s not heavy or exhausting; it’s so deliciously fun.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.