Lovesong, Lyric Hammersmith, Seven magazine review The year is 2038, and Gordon Brown, blind and stricken with dementia, sits alone in his home in Fife, banging his fists on his breakfast table and shrieking into the ether. He believes that he's berating Gillian Duffy, the Rochdale grandmother whom he still blames, all these years on, for cheating him of the 2010 general election. There is a serious drama to be written about Brown, but, as Abi Morgan, who wrote the screenplay to The Iron Lady, with its unsettling portrait of Lady Thatcher, knows only too well, few if any scripts about politicians get commissioned - irrespective of how tasteless they might be - unless they have a Left-wing agenda. Morgan seems to think that she has stumbled on a scoop with her discovery that people get old, and it informs her latest work, Lovesong. It is once again about an old woman called Maggie, but it is not the famous one this time. It occurred to me, sitting through this yarn about a married couple in the prime of life and then at the fag-end of it, how hard a playwright has to work for her money when she hasn't recourse to controversy and Meryl Streep. Still, and it irks me to say this, Lovesong just about passes muster. There is mercifully no more political point-scoring, but simply some honest observations about relationships, the passage of time, and, ultimately, the dignity of love. Siân Phillips is, as ever, magnificent as the older Maggie, and Edward Bennett - the man who rescued the RSC's West End transfer of Hamlet when David Tennant was indisposed - is on great form as her husband, William, when he was a young man. Scott Graham's production is a little pretentious in parts - with strange, cinematic backdrops, this time of migrating starlings - but it is at its strongest when the old couple have to confront their youthful alter egos. In all their eyes, there seems to be the same plaintive cry: forgive our foolish ways. To Feb 4; www.lyric.co.uk