I was with a British Council party in a hotel at the base of the Pyramids on a night in mid-November 1990 when an excited Christopher Hampton arrived hotfoot from London with the news that Geoffrey Howe had savaged Margaret Thatcher in his Commons resignation speech.
The speech was one of the defining moments in modern politics and Jonathan Maitland has had the bright idea of using it as the source for an extremely entertaining play that looks at why the placid-seeming Howe was driven to such unwonted ferocity.
Part of Maitland’s thesis is that it was Lady Howe who put the steel into her husband. Tracking back to 1981, when Howe was basking in glory as Thatcher’s chancellor, the play shows that even then there was a palpable tension between Howe’s progressive wife and his reactionary boss: at one point we see Elspeth Howe, who was chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, bridling at Thatcher’s suggestion that there’d be no rest until socialism was “routed”. But Maitland also shows how Howe himself, when foreign secretary, became increasingly disenchanted by Thatcher’s vehement anti-European stance.
That aside, Maitland gives us a clear sense of the way politics is shaped by personalities and of the way Lady Howe, although she didn’t write her husband’s resignation speech, decisively affected its tone. In Ian Talbot’s lively production, Jill Baker lends Elspeth Howe exactly the right resolute strong-mindedness and shows why James Wilby, as her emollient husband, is so devoted to her. Steve Nallon, Thatcher’s voice on Spitting Image, plays the prime minister and, while exactly replicating her mannerisms,misses the sexiness she allegedly used as a tactical weapon. But, with firm support from Graham Seed, Tim Wallers and John Wark, this is an enjoyable play that reminds one of the heady days, before sterile TV debates, when British politics was genuinely dramatic.
• Until 9 May. Box office: 020-7870 6876. Venue: Park theatre, London.
• This article was amended on 6 April 2015. An earlier version said that the play omitted a key real-life scene when Howe and Lawson threatened to resign before the Madrid summit. That scene does appear in the play.
