Waste was the title of the play that Granville Barker wrote in 1907 and waste was originally its fate, because everything about it incited the censor to relegate it to the ash can. A maverick MP, badly needed by the Tories to push through a highly controversial Bill, has sex with a married Roman Catholic who insists on ending the pregnancy that follows, only to be killed by a backstreet abortionist. The PM-designate tries desperately to cover up what threatens to become a major scandal, encouraged and helped by the leading figures in his Cabinet-to-be. No wonder the play remained banned until 1936, when the ageing Barker himself directed its first public production.

And no wonder that it feels so up to date and to the point in our own cynical era. At the start we’re plunged into what we might call the thick of the thing: an elegant, airless political salon, where knowing banter is conducted in invisible inverted commas by ladies and gentlemen apparently auditioning for roles in Wilde’s Ideal Husband. Later, we observe great men calculating, manoeuvring and (sometimes) striking moral attitudes while Hugh Ross as their embattled leader tries to foresee and exploit the next move in the chess game. There are many other moments when Barker, who knew Asquith and his crowd very well, makes you feel that you’re watching backroom politics as they were and still are in Britain.

Don’t worry if you can’t understand Henry Trebell’s undeniably confusing plan to disestablish the Church and use its funds for education. What matters is that there’s a parliamentary Bill that matters hugely to him.

And then Will Keen’s scarily, chillingly single-minded Trebell, who admits to not having kissed a woman for a decade, gets momentarily waylaid by one Amy O’Connell, whom Nancy Carroll makes more needy, more touching, more of the vulnerable outsider and less of the opportunist flirt than the political snobs think her. Their wary, awkward encounter — she seeking warmth, he barely disguising the fact that intellect is his primary passion — is beautifully played by Keen and Carroll. There are also fine performances from Phoebe Nicholls, Richard Cordery and, representing the day’s religious Right, a wincingly fastidious Peter Eyre.

Indeed, the only fault with Samuel West’s mostly tense, always atmospheric production is that it’s over-reliant on the revisions that Barker made to the play in the decade where it has now been set, the 1920s.

Barker originally suggested that the thought of thwarted fatherhood surprises, preoccupies and deepens Trebell. That idea more or less disappears from the version at the Almeida, lessening the impact of some key questions. Which matters more, public achievement or private fulfilment? Can either ever be sufficient? Or the two be successfully combined? Like so much else in the play, those are questions with us still.

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