A Marvellous Year for Plums, Chichester Festival Theatre, review Hugh Whitemore's play about the Suez Crisis puts me in mind of the revision notes we used at school to scrape a pass in O-level history. It's thorough in conveying the key facts, but proves a bit of a slog. A Marvellous Year for Plums also feels like a piece that would work much better on television than as a stage drama. That at least would allow us some exotic locations in Egypt at the time Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, as well as sequences showing the military action that took place before the US put the financial squeeze on Britain to withdraw. But this windy drama is all jaw-jaw rather than war-war, as Whitemore tells the familiar story of how an England that believed it was still a great power suddenly came to look both weak and morally compromised, thanks to its furtive deals with the French and the Israelis. Most of the play focuses on the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, at first gung-ho and then ill and deeply distressed as his grand project collapses about him. The dramatist quotes Rab Butler's description of Eden as being "half mad baronet and half beautiful woman," though disappointingly this was a reference to his parentage rather than a description of his appearance and manner. It would have been a far more entertaining play if the latter had been the case. It's strange to see Anthony Andrews, so fondly remembered as the golden boy Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, playing this dry, ailing old stick with the toothbrush moustache, but he does so with aplomb. And the scene when he suddenly, hopelessly pours his glass of champagne on the floor and lets out a terrible cry of pain and defeat is one of the few truly moving moments in the play. As well as describing the half-baked planning and the humiliating aftermath of Suez, Whitemore comes across as a kind of theatrical gossip columnist. There's a lot of stuff about Ann Fleming's affair with the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell (Nicholas Le Prevost), and we also see the anguish of the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, when he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful, with David Yelland movingly conveying his crushing misery. Generally, however, there is a lack of passion and eroticism in the play's depiction of infidelities, and the attempt to conflate the moral shabbiness of Suez with dodgy private lives is unpersuasive. Imogen Stubbs is tiresomely pert as Ann Fleming while her husband, Ian, author of the Bond stories, is a mere cipher with a cigarette holder in Simon Dutton's performance. Throughout, the dramatist's attempts to to sex up his dry subject matter seem feeble and embarrassing. This isn't helped by a baffling design that resembles a crumbling ballroom - perhaps it is meant to be a symbol of Britain's decline - and Philip Franks's production, which seems conscientious rather than inspired. Just like the play itself.