Writer: Greg Wilkinson
Director: Anthony Shrubsall
It may have seemed like some sort of hallucinatory post-COVID fever dream, but no, for seven weeks in 2022, Liz Truss really was prime minister.
In this solo performance, Emma Wilkinson Wright plays Truss in her final hours as Conservative Party leader (and, therefore, PM) as she awaits the knock on the door from Graham Brady, leader of the 1922 Committee and in whose hands her fate lies.
This prompts not so much a reflection on her life up to that point as a demented autobiography. Starting with her first day at a new primary school, where Mary Elizabeth Truss refused to be addressed by her first name, we’re shown a person who has always defiantly stood her ground.
Such steadfastness can be an admirable quality, of course – but as Greg Wilkinson’s script shows, Truss would go on to often consider standing up to, and rejecting, alternative viewpoints as a mark of power even when the evidence proved otherwise.
The Last Days of Liz Truss? is at its strongest when it allows itself to lean into the inherent ridiculousness of the character being painted. There is definite humour to be mined in Truss’s absolute determination that she is right and everyone else is wrong, that a career in power is somehow her entitlement. When that is played with, such as in a scene where a “Liz 4 Leader” brainstorming session with her advisers struggles to come up with any positives but an almost endless list of negatives, the combination of reality and satire is at its strongest.
Wilkinson and Wright also mine Truss’s love of karaoke for all its worth, underlining key moments of the character’s political career with the belt of a line or two from some vaguely relevant 1990s pop classic. And there are some noteworthy moments, too, such as Truss’s cabinet in which none of the major positions were held by white men (“All there on merit,” Wright notes, before adding, “… and Suella [Braverman]”).
But elsewhere, the script cannot quite decide whether to highlight the character’s delusion or laud her having the guts to stand up to advisers and the “way things are done”. As her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng (played, as with all other characters, by prerecorded offstage voices of Steve Nallon, best known for his Spitting Image work) puts together a mini-budget that promises to cut so many taxes that the government would have no revenue to even service its debt, Truss’s truculence would be all the more comical were the effects – a spike in inflation, lack of investor confidence in UK assets, vulnerabilities to the pension funds that most working people are relying on for their later years – not so damaging and long-lasting.
The lettuce does, of course, make an appearance, as does Truss’s famous lack of humour about the same. It is a reminder that among the real-life events of 2022, Britain was able to find humour in it all. But that lettuce also serves to illustrate that the comedy within the play is not quite elevated enough; when one of the silliest moments of the evening is the repeat of a caper concocted by The Daily Star, it is perhaps a sign that one should up one’s game.
The Last Days of Liz Truss? bears a question mark in its title, hinting at the former premier’s determination to continue injecting herself into politics, whether in the UK or the US. But despite those hints at looking forward, this play focuses on looking back. Its two-act structure, stretching over 105 minutes, could do with shortening to avoid its occasional periods of straightforward biographical recitation. Like Truss’s period at Number 10, it is short – and yet, still too long.
Continues until 29 March 2025
