A Putney investor got nervous about Britain’s debt, went looking for the last time the country nearly went broke, and found Harold Wilson’s political secretary instead. The result is a play about it, set at Hammersmith Bridge.
Brad Sutherland lives in Putney. He has a degree in ancient history, spent the 1990s in the music industry during the Stock Aitken Waterman era, and by his own account was “a failed novelist for two decades” before becoming, in his words, “a failed playwright.” Ask him whether he’s a businessman or a writer and the answer comes without hesitation: “Definitely a businessman first.”
That matters, because Hammersmith Bridge is Falling Down, which opens at OSO Arts Centre in Barnes on 5 September, did not come from a theatre person with a political grievance. It came from an investor doing his homework.
The bond trader’s route to Harold Wilson
Sutherland started researching historical debt crises the way an investor researches risk: looking for precedent. “It’s a bit like Michael Burry, who was predicting a crisis in the mortgage market in 2007,” he says, comparing himself to the investor who called the financial crash later dramatised in The Big Short. “I felt like, oh goodness, show me this is safe. So I was researching, and then I found out about Marcia Williams and Harold Wilson. That is a fascinating relationship.”
Williams was Wilson’s political secretary and the most powerful, most controversial woman in Number 10 during his two spells as prime minister. Sutherland’s telling of her is not gentle. He describes her marching into Number 10, finding Wilson with two journalists, and ordering him out on the spot: “Get your things together and come with me right now.”
Then there is the line he built into the play’s Violet character, drawn from an account of what Williams reportedly told Wilson’s wife, Mary: “I slept with your husband six times in 1956 and it was very unsatisfying.” Sutherland removed the sexual detail from the finished script.
The result is what Sutherland calls “close to Master Builder meets Death of a Salesman”: a description that does more work in six words than most synopses manage in a paragraph. The play follows Edward Stiles, a Labour MP, and Violet, his adviser of thirty years, as a younger aide arrives and starts persuading Edward to tell the truth about everything. It is billed as political satire with dark comedy running underneath, and Sutherland’s own line for it is simpler still: “An engaging story about ages and regret and dreams in the backdrop of what’s going on politically in our lives in southwest London.”
The bridge itself barely needs introducing to anyone who uses it. Its stalled repair says as much about the state of the nation’s finances as it does about local politics. Sutherland arrived at that conclusion from a completely different direction, and states it bluntly: “We built that bridge with manual labour and now we can’t repair it with all the modern machinery.”
His wider argument, delivered without much hedging, is that politicians get blamed for problems they no longer have room to solve. “The national debt is now encroaching on everything and it is deciding everything,” he says. “People think the politicians can change things. They are very, very restricted.”
Getting it on stage
Sutherland self-produces through his own company, Maiden Productions, and secured the Barnes slot in May, a fast turnaround he puts down to the play’s topicality: “Because of the play, it’s very current.” The director, Lucy Appleby, previously worked with Norman Wisdom when she was nine years old, a fact Sutherland mentions with evident pride. The actor now playing the male lead (Daniel Wain) was originally cast in a smaller role and was promoted once the production saw what he could do: “We promoted him, so good he was,” Sutherland says. The actor playing Violet (Nicole Cuthbert) has been directed by Appleby before, has an Offie nomination, and has appeared in a film alongside Kelsey Grammer.
It is Sutherland’s second full production. His previous play, Until She Sleeps, was praised for its emotional weight, one calling it “beautiful and gut-wrenching,” and he has had earlier work staged at the White Bear, the Park and Southwark Playhouse, winning Player Playwrights’ Best Play award in 2023 and finishing runner-up the following year.
On stage from 5 September
Hammersmith Bridge is Falling Down is running for one week only at OSO Arts Centre, Barnes, from Saturday 5 to Friday 11 September. Tickets are £18.90 for members, £21 general admission, and are available now. Book early.
Sutherland is already working on his next project too: a play about undiagnosed autism in a mother-daughter relationship, opening at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington in October. And Hammersmith Bridge? Its future remains as unresolved as ever, which, for a play built on the argument that some things simply cannot be fixed on demand, is rather the point.
Not sure about that AI-generated poster…