REVIEW by Phil Swinford: Handbagged By The Phoenix Players at Kings Theatre Gloucester

A WOMAN desperate to project herself as a strong Prime Minister alongside a Monarch keen to give input and prove relevancy, a new American leader, General Elections, a country in turmoil, rebel MP’s and Right against Left in Parliament.

Sometimes, Moira Buffini’s wry comedy about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with Queen Elizabeth II seemed eerily topical.

If you’re staging a comedy about Thatcher and the Queen, before anything else you need two mature, confident actors who can capture their essence – not just perform funny impressions, but make an audience believe Buffini’s words in their mouths, yet laugh all the same.

When you put on Handbagged you need four such stalwarts, for always on stage there is a ‘younger’ and an ‘older’ Thatcher and Queen with the older of each looking back on the memories of the younger.

In Dawn Hemmings and Pat Amphlett (younger and older Thatcher) alongside Nadine Wood and Phyl Dunford (younger and older Queen), director Jason Blackburn put the core of the show in safe hands with good comic timing.

The performances were surreally funny, yet authentic - it would have been so easy for any one of the four to slip over the top into a broad caricature, and none did.

As the play took us through the writer’s speculation on what was said by Thatcher and The Queen in their weekly meetings over ten years, Buffini’s humour gave a sense of humanity in the PM and the Monarch.

Thatcher was in turn damned, praised, censured or lauded, and the Queen shown at her most human – loving walking the fells around Balmoral, dogs, horses, barbecues, and worrying over her children in the Forces.

But this is an historically-set comedy, not a history lesson, as the characters were keen to remind us with an oft-repeated "I never said that" – albeit that Buffini then cheekily makes us doubt that the comedy is indeed fiction by having another player insist that the account is true.

To deliver her version of the era Buffini needs a veritable army of support cast to cover appearances by many who had influence in their lives. Cleverly, and with fantastic comic effect, all this is put in the hands of just two actors who are billed simply as Actor 1 and Actor 2, and who openly admit to the audience that they are simply support cast hired to act in the play.

Mere support they are not. Philip Douch plays Footman, Kenneth Kaunda, Enoch Powell, Neil Kinnock ("I'm doing Kinnock - it's in my contract"), Michael Shea, Kenneth Clark, Nancy Reagan (!) and A Protestor, with Derek Perry as Denis Thatcher, Peter Carrington, Gerry Adams, Ronald Reagan, Arthur Scargill, Geoffrey Howe, Rupert Murdoch, Prince Philip ("I only have one line as Philip – watch out for it") and Michael Heseltine.

Inevitably these two, slipping in and out of their characters as actors who slip in and out of their roles in the play, had much of the fun to themselves, but they also performed an important function in giving us, the audience, the 1980’s context.

This means the audience can be of any age - someone whose parents were not born when Thatcher came to power can see this show and it will still be relevant, irreverent and very, very funny.

But the play has some deeply poignant and moving moments. Actor 1’s discussion of The Falklands War, Actor 2’s lament for the loss of the coal industry and, particularly, the Queen’s grief over the death of Mountbatten and Thatcher’s distress after the Brighton bombings, these interludes test the cast and, if anything, lift the comedy that follows.

Did I come away having learned anything? I don’t know – this is Buffini’s imagining of meetings set around events that actually happened and words that were truly said, so the borders between fiction and reality become blurred.

I left the theatre still questioning what had come from Buffini’s mind and what had been drawn from history, and it is a tribute to the cast and director that I had difficulty separating the two.

What I did know, without a doubt, was that I had had a great time and laughed a lot.

  • HANDBAGGED runs until  Friday, May 19 at The Kings Theatre, Kingsbarton Street, Gloucester.