“My story has the form of a debate. It demonstrates how very easily history could have worked out in a different way.” So said Hilary Mantel in 2014 when she defended the BBC’s decision to broadcast her recently published tale, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983, against attacks from the likes of Lord Tebbit, the former Tory cabinet minister who had condemned it as “sick”.
Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1976 to 1990 , died in 2013 but feelings about her still run high in Liverpool, to judge by press night reactions to this new stage adaptation by Alexandra Wood. Loud laughter detonates in the auditorium with each anti-Thatcher reference.
Mantel gives away the ending at the start of her story, but Wood holds back and I shall follow suit. The story features Caroline, a middle-aged, middle-class divorcée, whose Windsor flat is requisitioned by Brendan, a working-class, Liverpudlian, IRA gunman because the bedroom window offers the perfect angle from which to shoot the PM after her post-op discharge from a nearby hospital. This fantastical premise never feels less than ludicrous and, moral vacuity aside, it is hard to see why people would bother to be outraged by it.
Where Mantel’s “debate” was a back and forth of overlapping points of view, Wood’s adaptation introduces more combative exchanges as well as implicit cross-references to the present (“Peaceful protest. There’s nothing criminal about it”) and a confused, surreal sequence involving falling bodies and speculative futures.
The strength of the production lies in the comic incongruities of the situation and in the playful subversion of audience expectations. These are gloriously realised, under John Young’s direction, by Anita Reynolds and Robbie O’Neill, who deliver Wood’s snappy dialogue with the bite, wit and laugh-aloud timing of a practised sitcom duo.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is at Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, until 23 May
Photograph by Marc Brenner
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