Never So Good

Synopsis

A play about Harold Macmillan (Conservative politician and Prime Minister 1957-1963). Set against a backdrop of fading Empire, war, the Suez crisis, vintage champagne, adultery and vicious Tory politics at the Ritz, Howard Brenton's Never So Good paints the portrait of a brilliant, witty but complex man, at times comically and, in the end, tragically out of kilter with his times.

Our Review:

27 March 2008

What do we remember of Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister during that strange interregnum between the Suez Crisis and the first post-War Labour government of Harold Wilson? One Harry followed another, but the world had changed: we lost a grip on an Empire but failed to adjust to the new European democracy and the loss of privacy.

Howard Brenton’s Never So Good – the title invokes Macmillan’s famous phrase, usually taken as an over-smug motto for the era, “most of the people in this country have never had it so good” – is a fascinating chronicle play that is remarkable for its breadth of interest and lack of attitude.

That sums up a faint sense of disappointment in Howard Davies’ production that nonetheless implies the very interesting theory that politics is no place for human decency. “SuperMac” as we came ironically to know him after a newspaper cartoon, was the first public figure to be openly lampooned on the contemporary stage, ...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

David Baxter - 14 August 2008:

History, politics, the theatre - it only needed a quick game of football or rugby in the interval and every one of my boxes would have been ticked. Harold Macmillan is now most remembered for the Profumo scandal but Never So Good paints a fascinating portrait of the man across the four major periods which shaped his politics and his life. Howard Brenton is an unlikely hagiographer but it is to his great credit that he has found the humanity in Macmillan who was never able to forget the suffering of the millions who died or were maimed in the First World War and was a one-nation Tory before they were invented. This is a much more sympathetic portrait than Michael Billington managed in his pitifully one-eyed book, State of the Nation. I have never been a fan of Jeremy Irons but he is exceptional as Macmillan, inhabiting the man so completely that all of his usual ticks disappered. Some of the other characterisations are less successful; presumably Robert Hardy was unavailable to play Churchill. Never So Good may be too dry for anyone without an abiding interest in political history of the 20th century, but for those who have it is an absolute triumph....

Read more and add your own review