Beaton's masterly exercise in the kind of comedy whose truth to life is proportional to its hilarity, is a play about something familiar and unloved – political spin-doctoring. No particular party is mentioned, but Beaton very obviously has Blair's "New Labour" in view, for the good reason that New Labour has been more successful than its rivals at Massaging the Message. This is more or less all that political parties can do these days, given that their policy options are hopelessly squeezed between two adamantine limits – on the one hand, the mastery exercised over domestic events by global economic factors, and on the other hand, the supposed piety that parties which raise income tax always lose elections
    In this sense, Beaton is not only poking merciless fun at the serpentine endeavours of political animals to wind the truth fifty different ways at once – he is also showing us the future of limited-power, media-driven managerial-style politics, which is all that the contemporary world allows to those who now run national governments.
     Two things make Feelgood a first rate theatrical night out. One is Beaton's script, and the other is the high-voltage brilliance of Henry Goodman's manic Eddie, a reincarnation of Machiavelli, driven by an angry desire to get the rest of the world to see things his – the Party's – way. Things go wrong, as they inevitably do; and Eddie's increasingly energetic efforts to make them go right again are the driving force of the action. Its rudders are variously the feebleness or the fits of conscience of those around him. By the magic of theatre, it is the unlikeable, manipulative, unprincipled and dishonest Eddie one ends by liking – certainly far more than the feeble or the conscience-smitten, who seem merely to stand in the way of the greater good which in Eddie's world is: winning the next election, whenever it is.
AC Grayling