Review: Never So Good

With a play featuring four PMs and one American president — Ian McNeice’s Churchill is hugely entertaining — there was always the risk, happily avoided, of a play infected by mimicry. But Howard Davies’s skilful production is hindered though by a repetitive dance motif that establishes 20th-century eras with sometimes lazily choreographed waltzes, jitterbugs and twists.

When the cast break into be-bop, it is time for the Suez crisis. And it is here that Brenton provides a fascinating view of a period when Britain, under the nervous-wreck leadership of Eden (Anthony Calf), was more closely allied to Israel than America.

Twenty-five years ago, Brenton wrote a play that argued it was ordinary people who won the Second World War and not the likes of Churchill. It is a point of view that Never So Good, which is overwhelmingly concerned with leaders, their dilemmas and their decisions, and much less so by the people affected by them, might have benefited from.

But as a modern history play, Never So Good — as much a tribute to, as a portrait of its subject — works well. Sometimes superbly well. And the play confirms Macmillan’s reputation as an old-school leader stranded by crumbling deference just when the ’60s started to swing. “My problem,” he says Irons’s Macmillan with disarming honesty, “is that I don’t understand the time we’re living in.” (Tel: 020 7452 3000)