Thatcher-Rite. Camden People’s Theatre.

Jack Boal’s one-person show Thatcher-Rite is a very strange creature. Part political performance art, part slapstick drag show (Boal lip syncs Margaret Thatcher’s most memorable speeches as if they are Rihanna hits), and part interactive tea-party, it is bizarre, frequently baffling, and often completely bonkers. Is it any good? Your guess is as good as anyone else’s in the almost entirely bemused audience. It is not unenjoyable exactly. It is certainly unexpected, and it is most definitely edgy. Reflecting on the show is like waking up after the most dissolute undergraduate freshers-week party ever with an urgent thought stabbing at your brain: ‘Did last night really happen?’.

It starts reassuringly enough. Boal, face made up in fierce kabuki white and red, is bedecked in a fetching pale blue frock with frills and padded shoulders straight out of an ‘80s Hollywood soap opera. Adorned with frumpy pearls and gold, drag Maggie sits at a kitchen table that is laid out for the kind of polite five o’clock tea your aged granny used to have. There are home movies playing in the background accompanied by a voiceover lampooning the preoccupations of lower middle-class little Englanders. There are some verbatim recordings of random Londoners reflecting on the Thatcher era. It is funny and thought-provoking, up to a point. A best guess would be that this is a performer working out his own attitude towards the iron lady and concluding that she was not so bad after all.

Then it all gets weird. Boal invites (perhaps summons would be a better word) four audience members, by name, to join him at the tea table. Tea is brewed up and served, and there is a clever running gag to do with cucumber sandwiches. Polite small talk is demanded and delivered. In between miming the lady’s best hits, Boal probes his guests and the rest of the audience on their attitudes towards Thatcher. Given this is a youngish, leftish Camden audience who have come expecting a show rather than a forum for political discourse, their reflections on our erstwhile PM are predictably harsh.

Boal proceeds to hector and harry his invitees (or, if you prefer, victims) into revealing more about their opinions. He invites some of the more strident audience members to exchange places with those at the table. What follows is a cross between an utterly brutal focus group and a particularly anarchic episode of TV’s Question Time. Biscuits, sandwiches, and Victoria sponge end up splattered across the stage. A hefty cream pie gets smeared in the performer’s face while a highly enthusiastic audience member (who may possibly have had a pre-show glass or two of chardonnay) throws cake into the rest of the audience. There is a sing-along rendition of Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead. Towards the end a question appears projected onto the back of the stage: “Jack, what are you doing?” One suspects this encapsulates what many of the audience are thinking. All this may have been a fever-dream, but it certainly feels like it happened.

Writer: Jack Boal

Director: Lila Robirosa

This Review First Appeared in The Reviews Hub