Actor and writer Simon Woods was about to chuck it all for garden design when he sat down and wrote Hansard, a problem play about a Tory politician, his liberal wife, and Section 28—a 1988 amendment to ban the teaching “of the acceptability of homosexuality.” Woods’s agent sent the play to the National Theatre and now it’s opening with Lindsay Duncan, still remembered for her riveting Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Alex Jennings, who’s been a beguilingly aspish Duke of Windsor in The Crown. —L.J.