Bring a hankie... the Queen’s back for a ding-dong with Maggie
Handbagged (Kiln Theatre, London) Verdict: Queen of all she surveys ★★★
COMING in the middle of our national mourning, the press night of the revival of this satirical comedy — about the 11 years of audiences at Buckingham Palace between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher — began with a painfully awkward apology.
Heart obviously in mouth, lest she be hanged, drawn and quartered for appearing to snigger at our late monarch, the Kiln’s artistic director Indhu Rubasingham nervously assured us that she and her colleagues had given ‘deep consideration’ to whether or not to go ahead with Moira Buffini’s play.
She explained that the show had been planned a year before its opening, to coincide with the Platinum Jubilee. They couldn’t have known what was coming.
And in a rare outbreak of royalism in the formerly Irish Republican stronghold of Kilburn High Road, we were asked to share a minute’s silence.
Ironically, something similar happened at the play’s premiere in 2013 — just a few months after Mrs Thatcher had died. The satirical focus then fell on the former PM; and many thought the play was in poor taste — nor was Lady Thatcher offered the consolation of a minute’s silence.
Happily, this time, it turns out to be nothing less than an unexpected and moving joy to see our Queen live again, in a play that shares her alleged impatience with a Prime Minister she’s said to have referred to as ‘that bloody woman’.
The phrase may be wishful thinking on Buffini’s part. We won’t know the Queen’s exact thoughts about Mrs T until her private journals are opened, in another lifetime.
Even so, Buffini claims the Queen as a Fortnum & Mason socialist: one who speaks respectfully of the striking miners, while Maggie anathematises them as the ‘enemies within’.
Buffini makes much of Mrs Thatcher’s faith in free-market individualism and opposes it with the Queen’s Christian faith in ‘inter-dependence not nationalism’ and ‘Commonwealth not Empire’ — quoting Elizabeth from a Christmas speech.
Rubasingham’s production also sees to it that the antiThatcher satirical medicine is heavily sugar-coated by Dead Ringer impersonations.
But, pitch-perfect as the actors are, the play’s format of successive audiences does grow predictable — even with extra characters including Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, Enoch Powell and Arthur Scargill.
Both Maggie and the Queen are played simultaneously by older and younger versions of themselves, who freely interrupt each other’s thoughts. All four are craftily dressed in subtle shades of red, white and blue, and the only thing they have in common is a patent leather handbag on one arm.
Naomi Frederick has shrill fun sending up a younger Maggie, who lauds democracy and rails against socialism (a word she practically retches). Kate Fahy’s older Iron Lady gets to growl about ‘wets’ and extol Victorian values. Both versions of the former Baroness are contentedly deranged.
Mercifully, both versions of the late Queen exude the good sense and human warmth we all miss.
Abigail Cruttenden is a particular delight as the girlish younger ‘Liz’, who loves a gossip and is perplexed by Mrs T’s venom.
Marion Bailey as the older and wiser ‘Q’ is saddened her hopes for national reconciliation may be slipping away. Bring a tissue.