REVIEW: The Gang of Three by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, Minerva Theatre, Chichester, New Frame Productions, Tuesday-Saturday, November 10-14

The Gang of Three offers a fascinating and hugely entertaining time-travel trip back to an era when politicians were genuinely interesting, big beasts with big clashing characters.

Alan Cox is Tony Crosland, Hywel Morgan is Roy Jenkins and Colin Tierney is Denis Healey, and they offer very, very decent approximations (where is Mike Yarwood when you need him!) But the point is the interplay between them in a piece which leaves you reflecting just how different the 1970s might have been if only the three of them could have worked more effectively together.

Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s play balances the permutations of the three beautifully as we see them bounce off each other, genuine friendship mixing with real rivalry in a world where your colleagues represent mostly the number of votes they might bring you should they happen to back you – a world too where your friends are effectively the real opposition.

We go from Jenkins’ resignation over his support for Europe to his toying with quitting the party he feels he no longer recognises, his character contrasted with those of Crosland, just as Machiavellian as Jenkins but more playful, and Healey bringing an overgrown schoolboy jollity to proceedings – without being any less fearsomely ambitious than the others.

The play works slightly less well in the odd moments when the action freezes and one of them addresses the audience directly with their thoughts. The play is better than this – or should be. Its strength is in the interactions between them, the three together or in their various twosomes. There is a slight falsity to the monologues.

But it’s still a rich and fascinating piece, well researched and very well delivered, which rightly plays straight through without an interval and is all the better for that – a piece which leaves you wishing for a similar treatment of perhaps the most interesting figure of the era, the man portrayed here by the centrists as the arch enemy on the left, Tony Benn. It’s time for his reconsideration too.