LITTLE MADAM. To 27 October.
London
LITTLE MADAM
by James Graham.
Finborough Theatre Finborough Pub 118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED To 27 October 2007.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sat & Sun 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 4000 838 (24hr No booking fee)
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk (reductions on online full-price ticket bookings).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 October.
Maggie in a Grantham wonderland.
James Graham’s line with Margaret Thatcher both resembles and is different from his account of earlier Prime Minister Anthony Eden, which moved chronologically forward before focusing on Suez.
Graham’s Thatcher sees herself pulling Britain out of the slough of despond begun by Suez. Thatcher always said her Grantham grocer father was her formative influence. Here he’s putting the iron in the Iron Lady’s soul by shutting her, aged 12, in her bedroom for refusing to apologise to her sister.
It’s her first battle of wills and remains the frame for projecting forward to her later career through the toy creatures that are substitute friends for the lonely girl. They emerge from the furniture, foretelling a future where she commands men as her creatures without finding a real friend - her husband’s companionship is unaccountably underplayed.
A resolute independence that hates the socialist state, determination to do what she sees as right at any cost, self-belief that cannot see other’s views, are all here. Yet Graham also shows Maggie writing sympathetically to the mother of a dead Falklands soldier. And there’s a surprising near-connection with a striking miner, giving her relentless attack on the miners an idealistic element rather than being simply a head-to-head confrontation, though Ian Barritt’s miner powerfully mixes anger and despair with family love. She also faces hunger-striker Bobby Sands, whose resolve matches her own.
Graham ranges from pointed political theatre (Thatcher prosecuting Keynesian economics in a farcical trial), through the trivial (the ‘milk-snatcher’ with teacher-Maggie denying her class milk; dangerous ground as Labour governments never reversed her decision) to Thatcher sharply dismissing a scandal-bound Cecil Parkinson (at the time it was said how sorry she felt, quickly rehabilitating him).
Whatever the quality of its episodes, Kate Wasserberg’s production of this political parade is born aloft by Catherine Skinner’s magnificent Maggie, catching precise vocal qualities, from Midlands girl to tutored Prime Ministerial tones. Though not looking very Thatcher-like, Skinner gives a strong sense of her manner and expression, showing the Iron Lady’s internal battle between a desire for affection and her innate iron will, ever serving her firm-set principle.
Margaret Roberts: Catherine Skinner.
Roberts/Bobby Sands: James Allen.
Teddy/Ted Heath/Saatchi/Al Haig/Archbishop of Canterbury/Miner: Ian Barritt.
Susannah/Roberta/Mrs Oldfield/Doctor/Secretary/Admiral Fieldhouse/Carol Thatcher: Leah Fells.
Medwin/Polly/Mr Littlewood/And Saatchi/Francis Pym/Mark Thatcher: William McGeough.
Alan/Denis/Judge/Norman Tebbit/Banker: Simon Yadoo.
Jonathan/Miss Gillies/Sir John Maynard Keynes/Cecil Parkinson/Soldier/Ronald Reagan/Electoral Administrator/Reporter: Hugo Cox.
Director: Kate Wasserberg.
Designer: Alex Marker.
Lighting: Tom White.
Sound: Laura Bassingthwaighte.
Costume: Nell Knudsen.
2007-10-17 02:20:28