Chris Eldon Lee reviews “The Confessions of Gordon Brown” which is at Clwyd Theatre Cymru in Mold until Sat 10th May 2014.
It’s twenty to six in the morning and Gordon Brown is already at his desk waiting for his ‘people’ to arrive to discuss the poor polls and his own irresistible disintegration. The second hand on the illuminated office clock is sweeping normally – but the other hands seem strangely stuck. Like Britain’s most beleaguered and belittled Prime Minister, they are going nowhere. Swamped with work, Brown is running the country with insufficient time to achieve anything much and he’s frustrated, very angry and far too fouled mouthed.
Kevin Toolis’s satire paints a poignant picture of our short-lived leader; a man whose burning ambition to rule was, implies Toolis, never matched by the ability to do so. Actor Ian Grieve has Brown’s bulk and his bludgeoning style, hammering ham fistedly at his computer keyboard and smashing his phone down on his desk; all the while over reliant on profanities. Like King Lear, he is a tragedy waiting to happen.
He has considerable fun along the way, challenging the audience to remember the names any of the ministers in Blair’s first cabinet. (We couldn’t – can you?) Toolis reckons Brown’s philosophy of ‘power in politics’ is that image is everything. You have to have height and hair. So Neil Kinnock would never have become Prime Minister (but Daniel Kawczynski might). According to Brown, nobody elects a short bald man; carefully pointing out that Blair was shorter than him and didn’t need so much gel.
His apoplexy at Tony Blair for keeping him waiting in the wings beyond the agreed hand over date is laid bare. It never occurs to Toolis’s Brown that Blair knew he was destined to falter. And his contempt for visiting overseas dignitaries is blatant. International niceties are a time-wasting pantomime. Don’t they realise he has a country to run?
What emerges through the angst is the way he feels cheated. The son of the Manse, here at last was a leader with a strong moral compass and a profound socialist passion for change for the betterment of all. He’s honest, he’s forthright and he cares. He should have been a great PM. But he’s constantly dealt bad hands. His eyesight was wrecked as a teenager, so those around him are blurs and he dependent on large print parliamentary papers. John Smith, the man who would have made him a timelier king, is cut down in his prime. And worst of all, he can’t control his temper.
But this is not a full confessional. We hear little about “that woman” (and we all laugh because we all know perfectly well he means Gillian Duffy) and there’s curiously no insight at all into his disastrous decision to call and then cancel the 2007 election, or indeed anything of consequence about the “getting rid of Blair”.
It’s an entertaining 70-minute tour-de-force that’s well worth seeing. But I came away wanting more revelations. And with a stopped clock above his head, it’s not as if he didn’t have time for them.
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