Writers: Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky
Director: Kirsty Patrick Ward
So much of British political life is the story of what might have been; not only the tightly run elections that could have catapulted another party into power but all those leadership challengers, the men (always largely men) who conspired on leather couches, plotted doomed coups in their book-lined homes and drank whisky while counting up their supposed supporters, all for nothing when their hopes were dashed. Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky imagine one such cabal in the 1970s as Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey attempt to seize control of the Labour Party, only to find that political history, and their colleagues, were against them.
In 1972, Roy Jenkins invites old friend Tony Crosland and colleague Denis Healey to his home to broker a deal over the leadership of the Labour Party and their fears that the hard left would consume their work. The men meet several more times, taking them into the 1980s, but personal power eludes them at every turn. Yet with divisions over Europe, surging debt and the party fighting an ideological civil war, the gang of three need each other more than ever.
Khan and Salinsky’s 90-minute play, performed at the King’s Head Theatre, takes place over five scenes that explore what the character of Jenkins describes as the ‘dead weight’ of the party, its ever-contested history of progressivism versus traditionalism, painting a stinging picture of the leftist alternatives that Jenkins dismisses as extremists. There is a lot to digest here, not least the challenge to democracy that all this backroom subterfuge creates but also the desperate politics of the 1970s, a very real schism in the Labour Party that will be familiar in our own times and the complexity of male authority and hierarchies of power among men who have known each other since their time at Oxford and, in some ways, never left their student days behind.
The writers spin all of this into four gripping scenes, a mix of two and three-handers in which the loyalties shift depending on the role each MP has at different points in time and whether any of them are happy to play kingmaker at his own expense. The dialogue is sprightly and often enjoyably cutting, people who know each other too well not to get straight to the point and the jugular, but as the audience drop in on them twice in 1976 and in 1980, how they have all been buffeted by the political fates and yet continue to pursue their personal agendas unfolds very nicely across the running time, managed well by director Kirsty Patrick Ward.
The one misstep in The Gang of Three is a scene set in the 1940s between Crosland and Jenkins, who had just lost the Oxford Union Presidency (which the audience has already heard), and reveals a sexual connection between the undergraduates that doesn’t quite fit. It is interesting historical gossip, but it isn’t used sufficiently within the rest of the play to explain the terseness and affection in their connection.
With charismatic performances from Alan Cox as Crosland, Hywel Morgan as Roy Jenkins and Colin Tierney as Denis Healey (with additional eyebrows), The Gang of Three is really about how this period of politics laid the foundation for the Gang of Four, Jenkins’ breakaway party that became the Liberal Democrats where he finally emerged as the centrist leader he had always dreamed of being.
Runs until 1 June 2025
