Barker’s 1907 play Waste, was originally banned for mentioning abortion.

“Life is overrated.” A line that was spoken on stage three minutes after someone in the front row of the audience had suffered what appeared to be a serious heart attack.

“To mention or not to mention” is how Miriam Gillinson puts it, writing about the incident sensitively, succinctly and – in my opinion – rightly. It became a part of the evening that is impossible to ignore, and strange to pass over without comment, if only because it raises some serious questions about the value and the ethics of theatre.

After a small shuffle at the front, what looked like someone leaving to go to the loo, a lady shouted that the man next to her was having a heart attack, a doctor clambered over the seats and the play was halted.

There was a long delay, deeply uncomfortable minutes, during which we didn’t know if the man was ok. During the pause people were laughing, were leaving to catch their trains – including a reviewer sitting in front of me.

In a deathly quiet audience, uncertain and afraid, there were pockets of disregard from people who were either showing a strange lack of empathy or, a more charitable interpretation, were perhaps just more inured to circumstances like that. A man two seats along was humming ‘Amazing Grace’, perhaps some kind of prayer, or pre-emptive funeral rite.

What’s the right thing to do? My hand instinctively reached for my phone. Then, slightly stunned by my coldness, I thought that scrolling aimlessly through Twitter or finishing the crossword would be a pretty sad act of inhumanity on my part. All I could do was sit and hope that the man was ok. It was stasis for a while, a couple of announcements explaining that the ambulance was on its way.

And then the play resumed, allowed to polish off its final few minutes with the casualty still lying in the stalls. And the characters discussed death and the platitudinous way we sympathise, and they took their curtain call and the audience clapped.

Did it go on because the theatre thought audience members would complain? Were those final few minutes necessary? They threw the play into a vastly different context, coming just after a death. Was this cynical and callous, or was it making the best of an impossible situation?

I really felt that watching the last few minutes of an alright play was less important than respecting the dignity and privacy of a seriously ill man. So how important is theatre, actually? Would it have been ok to tell everyone in the auditorium – all the press and special guests – to leave? What would we have lost? Should there have been a curtain call? It just felt like we were completely ignoring this huge thing that had happened. We watch theatre to puzzle out our attitudes to some of the most important issues in our life and world. We watch life and death enacted, and buy into the illusion that it’s real. But continuing with the show seemed to say that we’d rather watch the fiction than have to think about the reality.

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Harley Granville Barker wrote Waste in 1907, but it was banned on the pretext of its mention of abortion – though many have suggested that the real reason for its being censored was its takedown of the pathetic, weak, unprincipled men who ran the country at the time. Oh, and still do.

The play concerns a group of politicians trying to form a cabinet one of whom, Henry Trebell (Charles Edwards) wants to bring in a Disestablishment Bill. It’s all going really well, until Trebell sleeps with Amy O’Connell (Olivia Williams), the wayward wife of an Irish politician, and gets her pregnant. O’Connell has a backstreet abortion and dies. Then there’s a struggle between the personal and the political, a test for these men about what they truly care about: the state of the nation, how they’re perceived by the public, their own personal and religious beliefs. How much of their blustering assertion of principles will crumble when pressure is applied?

Barker’s play still has potent moments, and some of it is depressingly relevant. The second act opens with a group of old men – the men who run the country – discussing the morality of abortion. And they don’t even talk about the woman who’s just died; instead they consider it from an academic, a political and a religious perspective. They theorise, they sympathise, and they do nothing.

Edwards has politician’s charm in abundance as he waxes passionately lyrical about disestablishmentarianism. And Sylvestra Le Tousel as his sister combines a seemingly innate kindness with a devotion to her brother. Great, oversized squares of set, Hildegard Bechtler’s design, glide noiselessly across the stage, stark and blank, at odds with the antique furniture populating the rest of the stage.

The play is tightly constructed, beginning as a comedy of manners in the drawing room of an English country manse, and ending as pure and thoughtful tragedy. Roger Michell’s production suffers from a few Lord-of-the-Rings-inspired false endings as the safety curtain rises and lines are delivered in a tone of final pronouncement. It’s a strong cast, a strong play and a so-so production.