Dead Sheep (Park Theatre)
The Labour Party grandee Denis Healey said that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was akin to being savaged by a dead sheep. But the sheep was clothing for the wolf when Howe – who had been demoted by Mrs Thatcher from the post of Foreign Secretary to Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House – rose to deliver his famous resignation speech in Parliament in November 1990.
This marked the beginning of the end for Mrs T and the rise of John Major ("Major as Foreign Secretary? He doesn't even go abroad for his holidays"), and television documentary maker Jonathan Maitland, in a debut play, has fashioned a serviceable, occasionally very funny, drama of the fall-out between Mrs Thatcher and Howe, who was bolstered by a loyal and clever wife, Elspeth, who disliked her husband's boss.
If no-one else had been raking over this political period in the theatre Dead Sheep would be juicy chops. Instead – after James Graham's This House, Peter Morgan's The Audience and Moira Buffini's Handbagged – it's more a case of slightly mouldy mutton. And until he gets to the nitty-gritty, there's a certain amount of sign-posting and clunky time changes ("Now we're turning the clock back to 1981") in Maitland's text.
Still, Ian Talbot's fleet production has some laudable star turns from James Wilby as a decent, bespectacled, slightly worn down Geoffrey Howe, Jill Baker as the redoubtable Elspeth (irritating Margaret with her work on the equal opportunities and broadcasting commissions) and Steve Nallon as Thatcher herself.
Nallon, who "voiced" Mrs T on Spitting Image, has the gorgonesque side down to a, well, Mrs T: he's big and bulky, like a wind-up galleon, and he sort of totters as he walks, pinching mouth and eyes into a pout of fury and condescension at once.
The play defends Howe's record as a Chancellor, his work on Hong Kong and Gibraltar, and his pro-Europeanism. Having been humiliated, and deprived of his grace-and-favour residence at Chevening (which he and Elspeth loved), Howe wowed with the damaging assertion of Thatcher's innate suspicion of the EU and her propensity for sending her ministers into the firing line with broken bats. He stood up and blinked his assassination through a few pages of notes which hid daggers.
The aims of the play gloss over the part the Falklands War played in the tricky early 1980s period, and there’s no sign of the great moderator in the Thatcher years, Willie Whitelaw; Wilby’s Howe is here buttressed by Graham Seed’s sympathetic Thatcher apologist Ian Gow (assassinated by the IRA) and Tim Wallers’s hilariously outrageous Alan Clark (doubled with that blustery old Yorkshire press rep, Bernard Ingham).
John Wark’s brilliant evocation of Weekend World presenter Brian Walden – himself a Labour MP and a man who could not pronounce his r’s but could tie politicians in more knots than a chaotic wardrobe of sailors’ lanyards – is an enjoyable demonstration of how the play switches easily between political sketch and embryonic drama.
Dead Sheep runs at the Park Theatre until 9 May. Click here for more information and to book tickets.
