The New Real is bookended by scenes where an onstage character invites the audience to “imagine this”: the world in the early years of the current century. Rachel, an esteemed American political strategist and Caro, a revered New Labour pollster, are both recruited to help win – fairly and ethically – a ruthless election in an unnamed “former Russian colony” where truth is malleable and objective facts an illusion.
As a dramatic simulacrum of the past two decades of western politics, David Edgar’s play explores some pressing questions where the real-world stakes could not be higher. It’s unfortunate that these stakes are rarely matched by the dramatic ones. The compelling electioneering drama in the first act is more persuasive than the action in the second, where narrative questions recede and are replaced by a sequence of scenes where the dialogue frequently feels expository.
Nevertheless, the performances are often fine. Martina Laird’s smart portrayal of Rachel appears particularly vital: persistently pensive and focused, her words appear to organically respond to the live moment. Jodie McNee, as Caro, similarly imbues the character with more canniness that the dialogue sometimes permits, and Lloyd Owen, as rival strategist Larry Yeates is an effective foil (even if he is inexplicably fashioned as an overtly sexy Paul Manafort).
Directed by Holly Race Roughan, the staging is brisk; a multitude of locations are swiftly evoked on Alex Lowde’s traverse stage design, aided by Luke Halls’ video design and particularly the uncanny and unnerving use of AI-generated images. Here, everything and everywhere appears to be almost real without ever being entirely so.
But this rhetorical straddling of the real and not-real is a problem the play never quite reconciles. Had it been staged 10 years ago, one can imagine its theatricalisation of a post-truth political sphere might have felt more incisive and terrifyingly prescient. But we are where we are, and an invitation to “imagine this” is an irony of impossible luxury. To propose all this as ambiguous metaphor, while a very real war of Russian aggression is being waged in a real eastern European country, feels uncomfortably close to peddling alternative facts.
• At The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon until 2 November
