Moira Buffini
Theatre Nation; Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch
Lowry, Salford
March 18-22, 2025; 2hrs 15mins
(also at Theatre Royal, Wakefield, April 1-5; Blackpool Grand, April 8-12)
A play featuring our two best-known historical women in personal communication seems like a match made in heaven - well, heaven for one of them, not so sure about the other...
Sadly, playwright Moira Buffini can’t pull it off in Handbagged. A little like our revered former leader, she lacks a real sense of humour. The jokes are laboured; though this may be deliberate. The action is non existent. And the introduction of music seems to be a desperate attempt to spice up the action. Clearly, director Alex Thorpe had a difficult job to do.
A play set in the fairly recent past is difficult: if you ask actors to play real characters they may be forced to explain who they are for the benefit of younger audience members. "I am Kenneth Kaunda"?? "I am a jolly black man"?? "I run a country in Africa"... by which time older audience members have lost the will to live. Shakespeare had it easier; all his history plays were set in the distant past, so we accept we know little of them and treat them merely as people - in Shakespeare's case, who speak in poetic language. Which is another difference; the language of this play isn't very gripping.
Fortunately for audience members, the actors make the most of it. The play enables not just one Margaret Thatcher but two, to use their best impression of a shiny-haired politician engaging in banter - with due deference - with the Queen. Morag Cross would make a real politician green - or perhaps blue - with envy in her ability to be both strident and totally believable.
In the opposite corner is a Queen Elizabeth made familiar by the postage stamp above her. Sarah Moyle is totally believable as a woman of a certain age, able to look back with some affection to her delicate jousts with a conviction politician intent on destroying the very things that made the country what it is. And with Margaret totally unable to see this.
Sarah gets most of the good, funny lines, and she makes the most of them. The only weak point is that she has no dogs with her. As she says: "We did go to see the play War Horse. Loved the horse".
The other - male - members of the cast double or treble roles to ensure we are up to the mark with events. It’s a little depressing that Dennis Herdman, playing a washed-up former actor who happens to end up as the US president, is more convincing in this role than the current one. It’s a pity that plays can’t match real life for their lack of reality.
More info and tickets here
