From George Eliot’s Middlemarch through the novels of Dickens and Disraeli to the plays of David Hare and David Edgar, there is a strand of “state of England” fiction, which aims to show the working of the nation from Downing Street to village green. But the fragmentation of national identity has created difficulties for the genre: which single writer could plausibly enter the minds of both David Cameron and a teenage Muslim Londoner who travels to fight for Islamic State in Syria? This has encouraged a trend for dramatic anthologies, in which several playwrights contribute a scene each.However, John Hollingworth, an actor who appeared in one of those portmanteau shows – Women, Power and Politics at the Kilburn Tricycle Theatre – is now the sole author of a p