Play: The Absence of War

Overview
David Hare’s The Absence of War (1993) is a backstage political drama tracing a British opposition party’s doomed attempt to win a general election. It completes Hare’s State of the Nation trilogy, turning from church and law to the theatre of politics. At its center stands George Jones, a charismatic Labour leader modeled on the late-1980s and early-1990s experience of the party in opposition, whose gift for language and conviction is steadily muted by advisers, pollsters, and media handlers intent on avoiding risk.

Setting and Premise
The play unfolds over the compressed timetable of an election campaign, moving between party headquarters, television studios, trains, hotel suites, and rally halls. The offstage Conservative prime minister exerts pressure without presence, while onstage the Labour machine churns: strategists refine messages, spokespeople rehearse lines, and candidates are positioned for maximum safety. Politics appears as performance and logistics, a choreography of appearances that threatens to smother the very beliefs being sold.

Plot Summary
As the campaign begins, Jones senses an opening after years of Conservative rule. He wants to speak boldly about inequality, public services, and the ethical purpose of politics. His inner circle, scarred by past defeats and media maulings, insists on discipline: keep the leader on script, avoid ideological language, promise competence, not transformation. A televised interview goes well, but only because Jones submits to careful scripting; the victory feels hollow.

Small crises accumulate. A candidate makes an off-message remark and is swiftly disowned. An economic announcement is tripped up by hostile briefings and statistical nitpicking, feeding doubts about fiscal credibility. Jones asks for a head-to-head debate with the prime minister to cut through noise and reconnect with voters; the request is rebuffed, and the snub becomes another story about weakness. He prepares a major speech that would reclaim the moral case for his party, but his team waters it down, fearing headlines about extremism. He delivers the safer version to muted response, then broods over the speech he did not give.

On the road, Jones encounters ordinary supporters whose enthusiasm is real, yet every encounter is filtered through cameras and minders. A late-campaign rally offers catharsis; the room crackles with the electricity he has been told to mistrust. Almost immediately the moment is spun as dangerous “triumphalism.” The final week turns defensive. On election night the map refuses to turn red. The party loses narrowly but decisively. Jones resigns, addressing staff with generosity and bleak honesty: he never truly spoke, and the country never truly listened.

Characters and Dynamics
George Jones is eloquent, proud, thin-skinned, and genuinely public-spirited. Around him cluster a chief of staff who prizes message discipline, a media director schooled in damage control, policy specialists wedded to incrementalism, and loyal backbenchers drawn to his fire. The drama’s antagonists are not so much the Tories as the risk-averse habits of a party terrified of frightening the electorate and the merciless speed of modern media.

Themes
Hare probes how the language of politics is laundered until it says nothing, and how the appetite for victory can extinguish the reasons for seeking it. The title hints at politics as the civilized substitute for war; when conflict is evacuated from political argument, the public sphere becomes an absence, a managed silence. The play interrogates authenticity versus strategy, idealism versus managerialism, and the moral cost of treating voters as consumers. It also captures the birth of the spin era, showing how professionalization wins control but loses meaning.

Context and Legacy
Premiering at the National Theatre shortly after the 1992 election, the play drew on recent memory while refusing docudrama. It remains a touchstone for portraits of British opposition, revisited in revivals and a television adaptation, and continues to resonate in periods when parties mistake suppression of conviction for proof of readiness to govern.