‘They don’t think you’re left-wing, they think you’re highly strung.” That’s the kind of jab that Tory politician Robin Hesketh is slinging at his wife Diana all the way through Simon Woods’s side-splitting, erudite script. She returns them with even more potency: when he brags about the Tories capturing the mood of the electorate, she responds without missing a beat: “You don’t capture the mood, you create it! You make people feel like something is under attack and then promise to defend it.”

Hansard, a two-hander, was first performed at The National Theatre in London in 2019, but it seems even better suited to the small scale to which South African director Robert Whitehead has adapted it. The fact that actors Fiona Ramsay and Graham Hopkins don’t have to project to be heard by every audience member in the Golden Arrow Studio at the Baxter, where it’s currently being performed, allows for extraordinarily nuanced comedy and portrayal of their characters’ relationship.

Hopkins and Ramsay have been performing together for nearly 40 years, often as a married couple with a similar dynamic of resentful love (such as in their play Green Screen which they wrote for the Hilton Festival in 2020). There’s never a risk of one of them being upstaged – they bounce off of each other and catalyse each other’s comedy with their contrasting characters.

Ramsay’s comedy is flamboyant and intellectual while Hopkins’s japes are a combination of naughty cheap shots and dry wisecracks. They are yin and yang in a swirling, circular, laugh-a-minute dialogue of macabre marital humour. As they amicably lambast one another in waspy language, every rare moment that the audience is not dying of laughter, they are trying to discern how much of the playful, vindictive sparring match is real (and wonderfully, even the characters themselves are uncertain of that). 

Graham Hopkins and Fiona Ramsay in ‘Hansard’. Image: Philip Kuhn

One gets a sense of the couple’s age and social stratification from the way they seem to be whiling away their days, quibbling for more than an hour at a time, placing a stray puzzle piece as they potter past the cluttered dining room table. Ramsay and Hopkins clearly drew upon a wealth of research material – pompous Tori ministers and their privileged wives – to affect everything down to their neurotic mannerisms. Diana teases Robin for his constant concern with the fox tearing up the garden, which seems so frivolous to her compared with the political matters in his hands. Robin, seeing himself as a gentleman, takes the high ground and claims he doesn’t want to fight, saying “What are you doing?!” a lot despite making particularly nasty retorts himself.

The play is set in 1988 England, so many of the references are dated and localised, such as when Robin picks up an empty gin bottle and teases his wife, saying: “My god, Dennis Thatcher has nothing on you!” But the themes explored are just as relevant as they were in the Eighties, and unfortunately, even more relevant than they were in 2019 when Simon Woods birthed the play. 

Those who know the word “Hansard” (the traditional name of the transcripts of Parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries) might expect the play to be all about politics, but the politics is usually an allegory for much more personal and universal themes. The audience only actually understands the title when the word is finally used on stage. 

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The play is not relevant to South Africa in terms of its specific politics, but that’s not what it’s actually about – it’s about how to be a parent, and the sense in which a government parents its people. Disagreements about politics often boil down to ideas of how best to look after someone in your care. Do you make sure they have the support they need until they’re up on their feet? Maggie Thatcher would say that’s “subsidising failure” when you could be making them tough, competitive and independent.

Ramsay links Hansard to the escalation of political polarisation globally: “When Trump came to power, families were broken up along Democrat and Conservative lines. You have exactly the same with Labour and Conservative because of Brexit, and it happens in South Africa as well. What this play does is find the common humanity within the different political and social opinions and attitudes that separate people.” 

Graham Hopkins and Fiona Ramsay in ‘Hansard’. Image: Philip Kuhn

Graham Hopkins and Fiona Ramsay in ‘Hansard’. Image: Philip Kuhn

Hansard is rooted in a pretty universal interpersonal conflict and that makes it highly relatable. The clever, ceaseless comedy softens the blow sometimes, but it still hits close to home for a lot of people. It’s the kind of play you’ll probably wish your father would see. Indeed, Graham Hopkins himself told us that Robin’s hard-ass and typically masculine attitude of tough love reminded him of his own father:

“Hansard’s not about the time and place; it finds its relevance through real human interaction and dilemma. I found there were elements of my father that I was channelling there. That approach to how you teach a child to ride a bicycle: ‘Come on, my boy, doesn’t help to cry.’ That was very much my father to a T. I loved him dearly, but that’s how he felt – ‘give him some armour. Let him be a little tougher, it’s a tough world and he’s got to cope.’”

Hopkins and Ramsay’s extraordinary rapport does justice to a deftly written and directed play. So much biting wit and empathy is imbued simultaneously into Ramsay’s performance and Hopkins’s balance of clearly repressed emotion, giving way to moving sincerity, which is what this kind of social-commentary theatre strives towards.

Any perception you have of the play leaning left or right politically or one character coming across better than the other, is likely to be a reflection of your own ideology. Throughout the play, most people’s sympathies will oscillate between the two characters each time a new piece of essential context is revealed, and after finally discovering the full picture, you want to watch the whole thing all over again, to place all the stray puzzle pieces you missed before. DM/ML

Hansard is at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until 11 February 2023.

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