A play about Labour’s greatest Prime Minister is at Liverpool’s Epstein Theatre next week, while the Labour Party conference is in the city.   Clement Attlee is at the Epstein Theatre on 26 and 27 September at 8 pm.  

The play shows how, in six short years between 1945 and 1951, Clement Attlee changed the face of Britain and the way its people lived, creating the National Health Service and the welfare state, ensuring free education for all, and nationalising key industries including the railways.

“The lesson of Francis Beckett’s brilliant and entertaining play is that Labour is at its best when it’s bold, when it sets out to make people’s lives better, when it harnesses the idealism of its supporters, as Attlee and Nye Bevan did” says former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, shadow minister for international trade and the author of biographies of both Attlee and the later Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, says he is “recommending this fine play to colleagues.”

“Beckett’s supreme achievement is to render all the affectionately drawn key characters of the time accessible, engaging and inspiring” said the Morning Star, while the New Statesman called it “a very funny and at times moving account of Clement Attlee.”

“Francis Beckett’s comic play, A Modest Little Man, offers a splendid illustration of Attlee’s towering absence of ego” wrote Broadway World, and actor Bill Paterson adds: “You are blessed with a superb Clem (Roger Rose) and Violet Attlee (Lynne O’Sullivan).” 

Running time is about 110 minutes including 15 minute interval. The bar will be open after each performance, where the author and some of the cast will be talking about the lessons it has for today’s politics.