There have been plays that have used the years 1945 and 1968 to deliver little homilies about socialist hopes raised and dashed. Now, it seems, 1974 must be added to that list. A Short Sharp Shock begins with the fall of the Heath government, and proceeds to show the nation succumbing, after a long, strength-sapping bout of Wilsonitis and Callaghanosis, to what the authors fear may be a terminal assault by the bacillus M-Thatcher….

Unluckily, both the voltage and wattage of Shock are disappointingly low. It is neither good Brenton nor rousing agitprop. My prescription for socialist stage-drama is painfully simple. Either it must display a trenchant, tough-minded awareness of the contradictions of what is, after all, a very complex subject, namely the possibility of social change in stick-in-the-mud Britain…. Or it must draw on some powerful non-intellectual source of energy: a saeva indignatio, in whose armoury may be found satire...