WHEN junior Tory minister Robin Hesketh (Alex Jennings) returns to his idyllic Cotswolds home after a busy summer week in Parliament, he finds foxes making a mess of his garden and his unhappy, drink-sodden wife Diana (Lindsay Duncan), ready to do some destructive emotional digging of her own.

Over the course of an hour-and-a-half without interval, the two sixty-somethings pick, poke and provoke as they range over familiar argumentative territory maritally.

Yet gradually, and at Diana’s insistence, the old, well-rehearsed topics give way to new ones that have lain unconsidered for many years, leading to a dramatic and heartbreaking revelation about a painful incident from the past.

If that all sounds rather stressful, it’s anything but. There is of course a price to be paid for watching two people go at each other hammer and tongs for such a long period — especially when matters become fraught at the end.

But Simon Woods’s Hansard is leavened with wit and humour and Jennings and Duncan, both superb, ensure that we see that their characters, despite the animus and the hurtful jibes are, deep down, still in love with each other.

Although politics is at Hansard’s heart, it's not an explicitly political play. The setting is 1988, with Margaret Thatcher in power and Diana, aside from her many other complaints about her husband, has become particularly agitated about his public support for the attacks on gay people in the notorious section 28 local government act which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality.

Yet while Robin and Diana have become estranged doctrinally as well as domestically  —“You’ve been at The Guardian again,” he accuses her at one point — we’re not asked to choose which one of them to support.

What we are required to do is to examine the collision between the personal and the political and examine how one of the longest-enduring touchstones of Thatcherite politics — that individuals should stand on their own without support — plays out in the real world.

Woods has done well to raise it as an issue in this, his first play.

Runs until 25 November and screened live in cinemas nationally on November 7, box office and details: nationaltheatre.org.uk.