Handbagged - Stephen Joseph Theatre ★★★★

What if the two most powerful women in modern British history could sit down together and have a proper conversation? That happened in private every week for over 11 years and is the deliciously simple conceit at the heart of Moira Buffini’s Handbagged. Given these audiences between Prime Minister and Monarch are confidential with no notes taken, the play (part-satirical comedy, part historical exploration of one of the most explosive periods of British political history) imagines these encounters between Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher as something rather more lively, revealing and combative than the official record might suggest. First staged at the Tricycle Theatre in 2013 before transferring to the West End, Handbagged takes the relationship between monarch and prime minister, persistently rumoured to be “prickly”, and gives it a comic, imaginative makeover, deliciously surmising how things might have gone behind closed doors.

To play these iconic women in a theatrical setting, Buffini smartly splits both her protagonists into two characters: Liz and Mags, the younger versions of Thatcher and the Queen, who live out the historical events in real-time, and Q and T, the older iterations of both women who look back on their rendezvous with the benefit of hindsight. Given the famed aphorism that a week is a long time in politics, you could wonder how relevant a play written over a decade ago about the political landscape from four decades ago can be. Will the handbag have lost some of its swing?

Initial indications are not promising. The play opens with the elderly Mrs Thatcher (Alexandra Mathie) immediately breaking the fourth wall – if theatre in the round has four walls – and lecturing the audience about Freedom, Democracy, and the act of resistance. With the subsequent image of the elderly Queen Elizabeth II (Meriel Scholfield) entering, dragging a chair, things begin to look up. But it’s when Mags, the younger Thatcher, appears that the sparks begin to fly. Seeing Pandora Clifford‘s uncanny physicality and the verisimilitude of that voice, it electrifies proceedings and will certainly resonate, for good or ill, who experienced that tumultuous era for themselves.

The play is very funny. The younger selves are soon verbal sparring while their older counterparts heckle events as they unfold, making their case for historical record with occasional revisionism thrown in for good measure. When Mags is recalling going to the palace for the first time in excitable, florid inflections, T corrects her: “I was never sentimental.” Later, when an infuriated Liz (Liz Garland) states that Mrs Thatcher was racist, Q interjects with “I never said that” to the riposte from her younger self “But you thought it.”

While some of the chronological milestones such as the thorny question of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia’s independence feel relevant to a time long gone, other events feel they carry historical echoes into the present day. Thatcher’s free-market individualism, pushing for deregulation, and the increase of economic disparity fit all too well with the fierce contemporary debates regarding social welfare and the public funding crisis.

The nature of what it is to be British is a recurring clash between the Queen’s vision of civic patriotism, focus on society, and being part of a global Commonwealth and the Prime Minister’s jingoistic nationalism, Euroscepticism, and weaponised nostalgia. Sound eerily familiar?

The formidable quartet are joined by the excellent duo of Deven Modha as Actor 1 and Simon Darwen as Actor 2. If this sounds a little meta, it absolutely is. Both play multiple roles throughout. Darwen switches between a cringeworthy recognisable Denis Thatcher, an ominous Gerry Adams, and a hilarious Michael ‘Tarzan’ Heseltine. Matching his versatility, Modha gives us a Palace footman, an outrageous and chaotic Nancy Reagan, and the Queen’s Press Secretary Michael Shea, whose Scottish accent lasts as long as a Scottish Summer. In a wonderful coup de théâtre, he refuses to play the racist Enoch Powell.

Perhaps the funniest moments come from some self-referential gags about the theatre. The Queen admits she doesn’t really care for theatre, although she didn’t mind War Horse: “We liked the horses.” When things get heated, the Queen suggests that we should have an interval now, while Mrs Thatcher suggests we must go on and on.

Director Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder modulates the tempo of the piece with brio – brisk and pacey in all the right places but with breathing space when the piece requires it. Katie Scott‘s set design – a simple but elegant, circular wooden dais – is put to great effect as Tyrrell-Pinder marshals her actors as they circle each other with wariness and sometimes suspicion.

Other than a slightly tentative start, this production of Handbagged is a thoroughly enjoyable and quietly thought-provoking trip down political memory lane. Meriel Scholfield, Pandora Clifford and Liz Garland have terrific comic timing and truly mastered their characters’ indelible vocal tics while Alexandra Mathie has the more earnest job of reminding us of the Iron Lady’s intransigence.

The world may have moved on from Thatcher and the Queen, but Handbagged reminds us that politics has a habit of rummaging through the same old handbag.