Hare's general preoccupation with religion in this play seems to me rather incomprehensible. Gethsemane opens with a portentous monologue by the good schoolteacher. She kicks off by distinguishing between people who believe in a book in which all truth resides and "people without a book". People like her, ie good moderate people who have questions rather than certainties are, she says, the people without a book. In the same spirit, Act Two begins with another woman's monologue: "What worried me is the more sceptical the public becomes, the more devout its leaders. It's like we take the least representative people among us... and we put them in charge."

If this is intended to direct us towards some explanation of the Blair betrayals as driven by religion, then one can only really snigger. Plenty of religious believers, in all British governments, have not been "people of the book" in any literal sense. Most of Blair's ministers and cronies were very far from fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist anything. Their crimes and misdemeanours cannot possibly be explained by their devout adherence to the Bible. The only possible exception is Blair himself, whose behaviour may partly be explained by the feeling that he had a personal hot-line to God.

It might seem that there is little point in reviewing a bad play at any length. This review, however, is a protest not just against the play and its muddled, undisciplined thinking. It's a protest against the uncritical mindset of an intellectual establishment which can mistake such work for great political theatre. The intellectual weakness and flabby political judgment of that establishment are responsible for the Blair imperium in the first place and the Brown disaster which accompanied it.