THE RED PRINCE By Tim Dawson at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre, 24 February to 7 March 2026

‘The Starmerite MP: weak-willed and easily suggestible.’

A one man play about a new Member of Parliament from the 2024 intake, The Red Prince, has a lot going for it. It has a splendid virtuoso performance from Benjamin May as Craig Kitman MP, who is an (almost) sympathetic and believable protagonist, and Tim Dawson’s script offers some witty lines. But it lacks two important things. It doesn’t have a story. And it doesn’t have any politics. 

Not, I rush to add, that a piece of theatre must have politics; but a play about the trials and tribulations of an MP in the present parliament in which politics hardly gets a mention seems to me a very odd fish.

When it started I thought we were in for a theatrical treat. As the lights came up, director Susan Nickson has Kitman bothered and besieged by beeps and insistent rings from his phone and his laptop. In the middle of the cacophony, May looked every inch the jaded, miserable new MP of the sort you only get when there’s a landslide victory for one party. Too sensitive to survive long in politics, in normal times he would have fought one election in a hopeless seat and then found a more congenial way of earning a living. 

For the next little while, there was plenty to hold the attention. We start to care about Kitman, a public school product parachuted into a supposedly unwinnable northern constituency who now finds himself lonely and miserable in Westminster, and describes himself as “weak willed and easily suggestible.” And there are plenty of good one-liners. “House of Commons whisky. Retails at £30 a bottle. This one’s signed buy Rishi Sunak so about £5.”

Some of them are rather contrived. Kitman apparently wrote a children’s book once, almost certainly only so that he can add: “In the present climate it’s not pervy enough.” And the political ones consist of a few weak jabs at yesterday’s political figures: George Osborne, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell. To be fair, Rachel Reeves is also there, though the line about her is a bit cheap: “Very good at her job if it wasn’t for the numbers.” 

But the problem is that the play didn’t go anywhere in particular.  Lots of plot lines are hinted at, nut none are developed. We never quite understood why Kitman’s despair is so complete, or what he is going to do with it. All right, so he’s getting a divorce, he’s having a series of flirty lunches with a female Tory MP, he’s visiting a sex worker but suffering from erectile disfunction. But we wait in vain for a central thread, for all that to be brought together in a story.

I have an idea there’s a rather good play in Tim Dawson’s mind. But he hasn’t quite written it yet.

THE RED PRINCE By Tim Dawson at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre, 24 February to 7 March 2026

BOX OFFICE thelionandunicorntheatre.com/whats-on

Cast

Benjamin May

Creatives

Writer Tim Dawson

Producer Nice New Tie

Director Susan Nickson