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Staging “the death of Margaret Thatcher” out of london

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Margaret Thatcher … arousing strong passions.

Thatcherism may be dead, but its scars are still visible in many areas of Britain’s social and political life. The crisis in higher education, the state of public services, and what the former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications chief, Alastair Campbell, colourfully described as “bogstandard” secondary schools all have their roots in Margaret Thatcher’s grand project to demolish not only the public sector but the idea of society itself famously declaring that there was no such thing as society, but only individuals.

Yet there are also people — and not only among the Tories — who believe that Baroness Thatcher was a force for good who brought in a new work ethic and released energies that made individual enterprise possible. Even among the working class, those who benefited from her policy of selling council houses to tenants swear by her. Tens of thousands of ordinary people who could not dream of owning a house suddenly became home-owners in what even on the Left is recognised as a mini revolution in property relations. No wonder, 18 years after she was forced out of office Baroness Thatcher still arouses strong passions and remains a hugely divisive figure. So what will be her legacy? How will she be remembered when she dies?

The fact that she is 83 and in indifferent health (she is suffering from Alzheimer’s) lends some morbid urgency to the question prompting at least one young playwright to take an imaginative leap into the future. The result is Tom Green’s The Death of Margaret Thatcher, an audaciously irreverent take on her imagined death. It is as much a spoof on BaronessThatcher’s “demise” as on the media’s handling of her “sudden death”— and sometimes it is hard to judge which comes off better.

Questions have been raised whether it is in good taste to portray the death of a living public figure. But the team behind the play has defended it on grounds of creative freedom. “I don’t believe it is insensitive. It’s a piece of theatre. We’re not saying we’re looking forward to the day Thatcher dies. We’re all going to die one day and she’s no different,” Mr. Green told the BBC.

Nevertheless, even hardboiled Thatcher-baiters are likely to wince when the first thing they see as they enter the small auditorium is a glistening mahogany coffin that remains centre-stage throughout the play and around which all the action takes place.

The play, set in a fictional BBC newsroom, opens with a young news reader asking her colleagues whether she looks “serious enough” before going on air to break the news that “Baroness Thatcher who as Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first woman Prime Minister has died.”

Soon, a political row erupts as Downing Street announces that Baroness Thatcher would not be given a state funeral. A spokesman for “Prime Minister David Cameron” is reported as saying that while the government recognises her contribution to the nation it believes that she was a highly “divisive” and “polarising” figure to deserve a state funeral.

In the news bulletins that follow, excited TV reporters tell us how a former steel worker — a victim of Thatcherism — has embarked on a mission to walk all the way to London to “spit on Maggie’s coffin.” On the way, he is joined by “hundreds” of others; while in London “clashes” are feared among fans of “Maggie” and critics as the police mount a heavy security operation for her “funeral.”

In the TV newsroom, meanwhile, there is a mood of mock seriousness among cynical journalists with a producer unleashing loud and vulgar canned laughter into the anchor’s earpiece even as she is reading the grim news about Baroness Thatcher’s “death.”

Questions about Baroness Thatcher’s legacy are debated through a conversation between a man, “inexplicably” overwhelmed by her death, and his psychiatrist to whom he unburdens his mixed emotions about her. Then there is the undertaker who takes time off from embalming her body to deliver a soliloquy about his view of the Thatcher era.

It requires a certain creative chutzpah to stage something like this but, more importantly, it requires a climate of freedom in which it is possible to do it without having to worry about protests or death threats. It is hard to imagine such a play happening in India, for example, about a comparable living public figure.

The 60-minute play, directed by June Abbott, one of Britain’s leading Fringe directors, disappoints both in terms of providing any new insight into the Thatcher era or her personality; and, indeed, as a theatrical experience. But, ultimately, what makes it significant is its sheer audacity and, as The Stage, the newspaper of the performing arts industry, noted: “You have to admire …all those involved. It’s surely what good fringe theatre is all about — rattling a few cages.”

In a week when the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams found himself the target of a savage hate-campaign for expressing an opinion on the Sharia it was good to know that, at least, on stage free speech is still alive in Britain.

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