Howard Brenton has a terrifying imagination that makes his "The Churchill Play" … a very disturbing experience. It is an experience one would not like to have missed, but it unsettles the foundations of the world on which England unsteadily rests. One of the few matters on which it is still generally assumed that there is a consensus of opinion is that in May, 1940, England found a man who could, and did, save her. The haunting and alarming suggestion made in Mr Brenton's powerful play … is that the man England found was the wrong man; that the war of 1939–45 was less Hitler's war than Churchill's; that the British, and especially the Scottish, people were so demoralised by bombing that they bitterly resented Churchill's keeping them at war; and that this was the cause of our loss of empire, and the moment when our freedom went.

Now there is nothing...