Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho
Jon Brittain and Matt Tedford
James Seabright, by arrangement with Aine Flanagan Productions
The Lowry, Salford Quays
September 10-14, 2024; 70 minutes
Margaret (Matt Tedford), our heroine, has adjourned from the cabinet for the cabaret, this week in Manchester. "Manchester, that's right, isn't it? Or is it Salford? Which one's right?" The audience jumps to intervene. “No”, she says, “actually I don't give a shit.”
Halfway through the performance the head-mic fails. “Has it gone funny, this mic?” she asks us. “It's a bit like the North, this tech” she responds. “Just not working for me.” The audience roars.
There are plenty of gags like these, some scripted, some off the cuff. Particularly memorable is one about our Tories’ lack of concern about any kind of threat that could be posed by the Labour party, “who couldn’t win the Cambridge boat race, if they enlisted a flock of swans to throw truffles at the opposing team”, and other such class warfare from Thatcher’s cabinet.
But the main war of the piece is posed by Maggie against the scourge of the 1980s: “the hommosexuals”. Most of the first part of the show, when not singing, dancing or developing amusing character flaws, is the drive to pass Section 28 which, in 1988, banned the “promotion of homosexuality” by local councils and their schools. Haringey council (which is, by its own admission here, “a load of lesbians”) has evilly made available at a teacher’s resource centre, a single copy of a book about a Danish family with a little girl – entitled, scandalously, Jenny lives with Eric and Martin. (Google it at work; I dare you). The Tories have uncovered Haringey’s plot to infiltrate the minds of the country’s youth, and comprehensive legislation must be passed in order to save the nation’s children from corruption.
The chief villain here is Jill Knight, who eventually persuades Thatcher to her cause; meanwhile our Margaret develops a girlish crush on the leader of the Gay Liberation Front, Peter Tatchell. The characters are of course real, and there’s a history lesson slipped in somewhere; the artistic comedy licence speaks for itself.
All is going to plan: the cabinet is under control, the Labour party is nowhere to be seen, the hommosexuals are about to be defeated and morality saved. But wait! In a twist of events, Margaret actually reads the Danish filth, almost succumbs to the charismatic Tatchell, and begins to question her choices. Then, lost and alone in Soho, and rain-drenched, she is mistaken by a number of passers by for (would you believe it) a man in a frock! Horror abounds as she is mocked, feared and rejected with the rhetoric she has espoused, and she begins to feel… what could this strangely unfamiliar sentiment be?… Oh, it must be empathy… for the first time, and considers the plight of the revolting hommosexuals.
Margaret, our Margaret, is torn. Will she continue with the party line, or race back to parliament to stop the bill, heal the world and embark on a life as a cabaret performer… You’ll have to go and see!
Musical highlights include a horrified Thatcherite version of Anything Goes and Margaret’s own self-reflective soliloquy Always a Woman. As she tells us: “She'll promise you more than the Garden of Eden; Then she'll carelessly cut you and laugh while you're bleeding; But she'll bring out the best and the worst you can be; Blame it all on yourself, cause she's always a woman to me”.
Tedford is hilarious at Margaret, and in denim shorts, vests, boots and 1980s moustaches, he gives us the gayest Thatcherite cabaret you’ll ever see. There is layer upon layer of gags, politics, and drag. The 80s cabinet is a pantomime of villains and fools, reliving the wrongs of the past in gloriously ironic ignorance and irreverence. Ultimately it’s really sharp, really fun, joyful, and really, really gay.
More info and tickets here
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