Game’s up

Lloyd Evans

18 April 2009

Maggie’s End
Shaw

Death and the King’s Horseman
Olivier

Here’s an unexpected treat. An angry left-wing play crammed with excellent jokes. Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood’s lively bad-taste satire starts with Margaret Thatcher’s death. A populist New Labour Prime Minister rashly opts to grant her a state funeral which prompts a furious reaction in Labour’s northern heartlands. Former poll-tax rebel Leon Thomas organises a protest march to London intent on disrupting the ceremony and shaming the government. To complicate matters, Leon’s daughter Rosa is a rising Labour MP entangled with the super-smooth Home Secretary (with the slightly-too-clever name Neil Callaghan). In the opening scene Rosa is discovered tupping Callaghan on a parliamentary desk. The news about Thatcher arrives via mobile phone. Both orgasm simultaneously. Gags like these arrive in plentiful swarms. The Mail on Sunday is described as ‘Mein Kampf with pictures’. In a Geordie pub drinkers toast Thatcher’s descent into hell. ‘Hey, she’s probably shut down half the furnaces already.’ But the play aims its sharpest weapons at Labour rather than the Tories. Disenchantment with The Project is now general, universal, ubiquitous. The innocuous line, ‘Trust me, I’m the Home Secretary’ (which scarcely qualifies as a gag), drew such ferocious gusts of hilarity from the audience that we were startled by our own reaction.

This is not a perfect comedy and parts of its construction are extremely clumsy but it has the tang of real emotion, real anger and attitude. Forget the mirror held up to nature: this is the mirror smacked in nature’s chops. The play has a loud-and-clear message for New Labour. The game’s up. And the outlook for Old Labour is none too promising either. Leon’s climactic tirade against the present-day evils faced by radical politicians is, perhaps unwittingly, a useful analysis of the moribund condition of the old left. During the glorious 1980s they fought titans, Reagan, Thatcher, the Coal Board, the poll-tax, neo-Nazis. But look what puny demons remain to them now. DNA data-bases, PFI, student top-up fees, GM foods, CCTV cameras. Only a berk would take to the barricades to oppose these footling projects, some of which, by an apposite coincidence, have fiddly, jingly little abbreviations for names. This play’s run at the Shaw Theatre ends shortly but its stirring blasts of rage and mockery are bound to be heard elsewhere soon.

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