"The New Real". The Other Place. Stratford-upon-Avon

David Edgar is the modern Cassandra – an apocalyptic analogy for a dramatist who, in the flesh, is the most diffident and charming gentleman you could hope to meet. But in his plays he has always stood as truth-teller to the political upheavals of our times, fated, like Cassandra, to be heard but not heeded. In The Shape of the Table (1990) and Pentecost (1995) he focused on Eastern Europe and the end of Communism, and in true Edgar style he told those stories by interweaving the private lives of his characters with the public turmoil they were going through.

With The New Real, Edgar is back in Eastern Europe, in a semi-fictional former Soviet state. The focus this time is on the disastrous election meddling of American political strategists – mercenaries willing to use their superhuman PR skills to catapult to power any politician willing to pay. Steering a country to democracy or dictatorship becomes, for them, more a game of office politics than international diplomacy. The two central characters, Larry Yeates (Lloyd Owen) and Rachel Moss (Martina Laird – who really should play Kamala Harris at some point), use their rival presidential candidates as pawns in their own ex-lovers’ tiff.

This should be fertile ground for drama, and it certainly has been in the past, not just for Edgar: Yes, Minister, The Thick Of It, and even right now in Stratford, Kyoto all expose the fragility of political leaders in the grip of background advisors pursuing their own murky agendas. Kyoto puts you in ‘the room where it happened’. But The New Real flounders. It puts you in the room where it didn’t happen. It doesn’t have the cutting, razor-sharp wit and satire of those other examples, and instead becomes a plod through decades of depressingly familiar history. It purports to lift the curtain on shocking background machinations, but, for all the talk, there’s nothing shocking or revealing in this story.

What there is, is an awful lot of talking. And it’s sad to see the author of How Plays Work disregard his own advice about exposition. Supposedly brilliant young advisors come out with lines like ‘People tend to vote for what makes them feel good about themselves’, as if this is some kind of revolutionary insight. Their advice boils down to how best to tell jokes, and to relaying the undiluted output of focus groups, with advice like ‘promote diversity’ or ‘be anti-immigration’. These insights don’t make the audience gasp with astonishment, just nod in predictable understanding. Essentially, the play gets lost in the multiple strands of its own plot, and ultimately can’t decide whether it’s about the personal lives of the characters or the fate of the country. For a show that focuses so much on experts counselling speakers on how to communicate effectively, it doesn’t follow its own advice.

To be fair, this isn’t for want of trying. Director Holly Race Roughan has pulled out all the stops to give The New Real every chance of success. The setting, on a stretched, traverse stage, is dynamic. The acting, packed with multiple roles and multiple accents, is uniformly vivid and three-dimensional. (A particular mention should go to Jodie McNee as the British pollster Caro Wheeler. McNee has a purity in her performance, a sense of a blank slate waiting to be filled with each new character she plays, that must make her presence a gift for any director.) The design is dominated, thrillingly, by an array of screens that simulate a monitor wall, projecting news clips of significant political moments from the Kennedy assassination to Thatcher meeting Reagan. But even here, there is a blunt edge to the content. These sorts of compilations are commonplace, and it’s odd that the designer has chosen to incorporate scenes of 1960s kitchen appliance advertising along with the soundtrack of popular protest songs. It feels like Sympathy for the Breville.

There are certainly standout moments. The Eurovision Song Contest is a great interlude (but again: what purpose does it serve in this story?) and the scenes of presidential candidate Petr Lutsevic (Roderick Hill) being coached on his performance techniques reach a satirical high with the key piece of advice, ‘Don’t fuck the lectern!’ But overall this play is searching for a plot, and it needs to be much smarter to keep up with the current state of the world. At the climax, Lutsevic descends into full-on antisemitism in an attempt to win populist, hard-right voters. But in a world where antisemitism is now prevalent in areas of society completely opposed to right-wing extremism, and at the same time weaponised as some kind of front for pro- or anti-Israeli sentiment, the historic Nazi stereotypes feel sluggishly out of date. I’m afraid this is the Old Real. The New one is much more disturbing.