A chap playing Mrs T? It isn’t a drag at all
NORTH London’s Park Theatre is doing cracking business with a play about Margaret Thatcher’s downfall a quarter of a century ago.
It examines the role not only of Sir Geoffrey Howe — the one-time ‘dead sheep’ who savaged Mrs T with his Commons resignation speech — but also his Left-leaning wife, Elspeth.
Lady Howe has long been a bogeywoman for Thatcherites; some reckon she wrote plodder Geoffrey’s speech. Playwright Jonathan Maitland, a political journalist, accepts that she stiffened her husband’s resolve but he has high regard for her.
She and Geoffrey (played by a too slender James Wilby) are the play’s heroes, standing up to the hectoring of Steve Nallon’s big-shouldered, caricatured Mrs T.
Six actors are used, the Park’s upstairs seats lending the stage the air of the Commons Chamber with its galleries. Some audience members sit on stage in seats that become Commons benches.
This may evoke memories of a recent Royal National Theatre show about the Wilson/Heath years, The House. We have also had plays about the Queen and her PMs — politics is suddenly big box office.
The play opens with Mr Wilby’s Howe alone on stage. Enter Mr Nallon, who did Maggie’s voice for Spitting Image and is done up here like her puppet in that show.
The opening words are ‘no, no, no’ in a That cherish baritone. Warm laughter from the audience.
Mr Wilby wears Sir Geoffrey’s glasses, but there is no attempt to catch his ponderous timbre. Likewise, elegant actress Jill Baker is little like the real Elspeth. Where is the ageing-pixie haircut and butch briskness? Mother Thatcher was a gift for cartoonists but so was liberal snoot Lady Howe. Ian Talbot’s production could have had more fun with this grand old trout.
THE tale flicks between Howe’s Cabinet departure and the early years of the Thatcher Government when he was a radical Chancellor. A brief scene shows the early Howe saving an uncertain Thatcher in a meeting.
A split between the two only opened, Mr Maitland suggests, when Elspeth was truculent towards Mrs T at a drinks party in 1983. She dared to tell the Leaderene it might be an idea to try to be liked — a good moment of restrained violence between two predators. Having been in the Commons gallery on the day Howe made his celebrated speech, I lapped up this show. Shortly before Mrs T made a City speech full of cricket analogies (turned against her by Howe days later), I wrote a parliamentary sketch full of cricket terms. I have sometimes wondered if I contributed to the old girl’s demise.
Around that time I caught a taxi back to the Commons from a Foyle’s literary lunch. The Howes were in the car in front and I watched Elspeth bend Geoffrey’s ear throughout. Poor Geoffrey.
High points in this jolly show include cameos of Bernard Ingham, Neil Kinnock and Alan Clark (great turns from Tim Wallers), TV interviewer Brian Walden ( John Wark) and a self- admiring Nigel Lawson (Graham Seed).
Mr Seed also plays Ian Gow MP, a friend of both Howe and Thatcher who acted as ‘the glue’ between them until his murder by the IRA. This Gow role in the Howe/Thatcher peace-keeping was new to me and fascinating.
Surprising absences? There is no Heseltine and Denis Thatcher is only an off-stage voice.
A scene suggesting that the Thatchers did not much go in for sex generates some mirth, but is surely unkind.
The Howes’ domestic set-up is more sympathetically portrayed. Perhaps that is because Geoffrey and Elspeth are still with us; but the play’s failure to question Howe’s vehement Europhilia suggests that Mr Maitland may also have had political motives.