This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“It would not be true to say that we have been here before,” declared Clive Davis of The Times, before awarding two stars to Leeches, now playing at a community theatre in South West London. “Rather, it would be accurate to say that we have been here repeatedly. Jejune in every sense of the word.”
Happily the author of this searing account of a rack-renting Brixton landlord was not in the least discomfited. As he remarked, albeit at a slightly earlier stage in his career, “If I got a good review in The Times, I’d know that I’d failed.”
How old is Arnold, or, as he prefers to be called, “Arnie” Leverett? If Who’s Who, to whose blandishments he finally succumbed on the grounds that “there are people who need to get hold of me”, omits details, then it is a fact that his debut work, A Very Moderate Man, opened at the Royal Court as long ago as 1966 and that, as “one of London’s hippest young playwrights”, he was present at the recording of “A Day in the Life”. (Arnold will say only that “Lennon was the one I took to. A real radical conscience, you know.”)
A Very Moderate Man ploughed what would become a familiar furrow. Set in a run-down West Midlands constituency, it tells the story of a well-meaning Labour MP seduced by the attractions of the high life who marries an earl’s daughter and is thought to abandon his principles.
Tony narrowly avoided a libel writ
Its success was cemented nine months later by Bairnsfather’s Folly, the tale of a trade unionist who builds a miniature castle in his back garden before being imprisoned for embezzling union funds. Arnold was profiled in the Sunday Times Magazine, photographed by Lord Snowdon in a collarless shirt and featured in a book called Young Meteors.
It cannot be said that in the intervening 58 years Arnold has been idle. There have been many more plays: about fascist conspiracies, corrupt media tycoons and the betrayal of political trust. Tony, which opened at the Almeida six months after the end of the Blair government, caused a sensation and is supposed to have narrowly avoided a libel writ from Alastair Campbell.
There have also been several Mrs Leveretts and an unfortunate memoir in the Guardian by his daughter, Sacha, representing her father as a petty domestic tyrant prone to upbraiding his womenfolk as “daft bints”. Arnold was able to repair some of the damage with a piece for the same newspaper about his decision to turn down the offer of a CBE (“Why I will not be bought off by an establishment bauble”).
Spruce, white-haired and always ready to appear on a public platform or sign a round-robin letter, Arnold is, as he avers, keen to demonstrate that “the Old Left still has a voice”. If the theatres staging his work are getting smaller, the list of his celebrity admirers is still extensive.
So it was a great shame that Jeremy Corbyn was compelled to leave the opening night of Leeches half-way through on “urgent constituency business.”
