111) Little Madam, Finborough

The Finborough appears incapable of putting a foot wrong. They’ve put on one good show after another all year, and with their latest production - Little Madam, a ‘biopic’ of Margaret Thatcher - they’ve outdone them all.

Margaret Roberts is the 12-year-old daughter of a grocer in Grantham in the East Midlands. Her father is a stern man, hell-bent on prudence and self-improvement. As the show opens, Margaret is throwing a strop, and while her father insists that she apologize to her sister and to her mother for behaving badly with them, Margaret, strong-willed to the point of stubbornnes and absolutely convinced of the rightness of her position, refuses to do any such thing. In that scene is set out, in microcosm, the defining character traits of Margaret Thatcher, the woman who broke all the moulds, who became the first female prime minister in the Western world, who took a whole nation by the scruff of the neck and shook them until their teeth rattled, and who was one of the half dozen people responsible for the eventual destruction of the post-war order.

The play is set in Margaret’s upstairs bedroom above the Roberts’ shop, and is laid out in the form of a series of ‘mini-plays’ acted out by Margaret, her teddy bear and her imaginary playmates – in reality they take in the whole sweep of Thatcher’s life, from Grantham to Oxford and from there to the ranks of the Conservative party, which she climbs up steadily, all the while being discounted and underestimated by the male-dominated hierarchy surrounding her. Along the way there are delightful vignettes: a trial that pits her against the apostle of state intervention, John Maynard Keynes, although the economic logic employed in this trial seemed to be a bit muddled and simplistic. Then there’s her meeting with amiable old Denis Thatcher who willingly effaces himself in order to promote his wife’s political career. Denis’ marriage proposal to Margaret is one of the more touching scenes in the play – ‘I will give you my name.’ – ‘I will take it and inscribe it across an age.’ Simon Yadoo does an excellent job as the decent but thoroughly house-trained Denis.

Everything gets a nod – the blue dress, the handbag that became her trademark, Ted Heath, Cecil Parkinson who drove her rise to the top, Saatchi and Saatchi who fixed her voice and accent and engineered her victory in the ‘79 elections. (The Saatchis are a dead funny duo in their square specs.) In the early years of her reign, Thatcher plumbs the depths of unpopularity, only to be lifted up again by the Falklands War, played out on a painted map on the bedroom floor. The sinking of the Belgrano is punctuated by that (in)famous Gotcha! The comparison between the Virgin Queen and Thatcher is made explicit.

Thatcher proceeds to privatize the family silver (to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd’s Money) and oversees Britain’s descent into shameless credit-fuelled consumerism. Moral objections, in the shape of the slightly hypocritical Archbishop of Canterbury, are shut up and speeded up by a brand new, beautifully convenient device – the remote control! Bobby Sands, slowly starving himself to death, haunts Margaret from the other side of the wall and then the bomb goes off in Brighton. Even Cecil Parkinson is dispatched in ruthless, cynical fashion. The worthless twins Mark and Carol get their own family spat.

And finally there comes that epic, elemental confrontation, the defining event of Margaret Thatcher’s political career – the miners’ strike. In a long and beautifully written scene, the miner and Maggie put across their respective sides - the miner’s desire for the continuation of his way of life, pitted against Maggie’s insistence on tearing it all up but only because she believes that something better can take its place instead. In the background, in a puppet piece, the traitorous Hezza whacks Maggie from behind, foretelling the end of her career.

And yet, at the end of the drama – I think the playwright realized that if he wanted to write his way up to 1990, he would clock in at over 3 hours, so the ending had a slightly hurried feel to it – at the end, Margaret Thatcher walks out, her back straight and her head held high, proud, unbowed and defiant to the end, with the salutary words Fuck’em! You can’t but admire her iron will and her guts of steel.

It turns out that the playwright James Graham is only 25. I don’t know how a lad so young could pen a play so vivid, so pacy, so alive but Graham has evidently done it and on the evidence of this, I have no hesitation in saying that he has a star-spangled career ahead of him. What I found most remarkable about the script was its balance – Graham is nothing if not conscientious about presenting both sides of Thatcher’s story. The production is sharp, fast-paced and very creative in its presentation and for that the director must take some of the credit. But ultimately, the play hangs together or falls apart on the strength of the central performance, and it is here that the Finborough has scored this palpable hit. Catherine Skinner gives an utterly brilliant performance as Margaret - whether as a petulant child or as a helium-voiced Prime-Minister, she is never less than awesome. A star-making turn - and yet here she is sitting outside the bar with a friend, as plain as yoghurt! Truly what a glorious transformation it is that takes place when the lights go down...

P.S. After having seen over a hundred plays on the London stage in the last couple of years, and written about them on and off here and there, in an LJ blog and in a Facebook group, I've finally decided to be a little more organized about it. Hopefully, this will be a bit more regular, a bit more complete than the others were!