The timing couldn’t have been better. Joe Penhall’s new play arrives just at the moment when the relationship between members of parliament and the people they represent is uppermost in our minds. And the fact that James Corden is making his long overdue return to the London stage, playing a troubled army veteran alongside Line of Duty’s Anna Maxwell Martin as a hard-working backbencher, will surely help at the box office as well.
That said, this turns out to be a surprisingly tepid study of a vulnerable man whose life has lost its moorings. Penhall, who has explored mental frailties before in the more accomplished Blue/Orange, a chamber piece set in a psychiatric clinic, is said to have interviewed a number of MPs including