Olivier Award-Winning Playwright Jon Brittain talks to us about the evolution of Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho, which opens at the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End tomorrow.
On June 11th 2013, Matt Tedford took to the stage of Theatre503, the 60-seat new writing theatre located above the Latchmere pub in Battersea. He was dressed as the Iron Lady, singing YMCA and embarking on the world premiere of a short play called Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho.
This Thursday, eight years later, Matt will take to the stage again, this time at the Garrick Theatre, a slightly larger venue, for Maggie’s West End debut.
So, how exactly did that happen?
Before Maggie, I’d taken part in dozens of short play nights. Usually, you wrote the play, you’d find some actors, rehearse in someone’s flat, do the show, have fun, get drunk afterwards and… well, that was it. Until Maggie.
In 2013, the outgoing manager of the Latchmere pub hired me despite the fact I knew nothing about bar-tending, shortly afterward, Steve Harper, the literary manager of Theatre503, came down and said that in light of Margaret Thatcher’s recent death, would I be interested in writing a short play about her?
He did know I was a playwright by the way, he wasn’t just asking the first person he saw upon leaving the theatre.
I told him not only that I would write something, but that I knew exactly who should write it with me and play the Iron Lady. The reason I was so sure of this is that, 9 months earlier, my friend Matt had come to my halloween party dressed as Margaret Thatcher. He did an uncanny version of her voice, he carried a pint of milk in his handbag and had everyone in gales of laughter and hanging off his every word. Within seconds of me texting Matt asking him if he’d like to do the play, he’d responded “yes!”
Over the next couple of weeks, we wrote the script in whatever snatched moments we could find. We immediately focused on Mrs Thatcher’s relationship with Section 28, which we’d both gone to school under, but rather than approach it in a po-faced manner, we tried to write things that made each other laugh – being deliberately silly to contrast with the other more serious short plays in the evening. In our version of events, Maggie got lost in Soho on the eve of the vote, and had an epiphany about the error of her ways whilst doing karaoke in a gay bar. We included songs like YMCA and It’s Raining Men, that Matt not so much sung as shouted along to as Maggie. I did the lights and sound, Matt tailored his own costume, we made a giant “Maggie Says Relax” out of a bedsheet and painted it on my living room floor. We found some actors, we rehearsed it in my flat, we did the show, had fun, got drunk afterwards… but unlike all the other times that wasn’t it.
The short play received rave reviews (it was the first night of theatre about Mrs. T following her death so it got
national coverage), Matt shone, taking the script we’d written and embellishing it effortlessly with ad-libs and audience interaction, and we immediately began discussing fancifully how fun it would be to expand the piece. Then, Steve told us that Theatre503 needed a Christmas show, one of their resident assistant producers, Áine Flanagan, wanted to produce. None of us had any money, there was barely any time to write it, let alone rehearse it, and we all secretly feared that any interest in Thatcher and her legacy would have evaporated come December. Nevertheless, we carried on, expanding the script to explore more real history (with an outrageously camp spin on it), incorporating absurd caricatures of figures such as Jill Knight and Peter Tatchell. We obsessively researched the era and tried to smuggle in as many easter eggs for politics buffs as possible – while still keeping it accessible for others. We even decided to perform a scene together, and wrote a two-hander for Maggie and a filthy-mouthed portrait of Winston Churchill voiced by me. When we finished the script we weren’t sure if we had something workable, but that didn’t stop us signing off with the (ironic, but not completely ironic) stage direction “Blackout. Oliver please.”
It was so ridiculous to us that the show had gotten this far that we never dreamed it might have a life beyond that month… but, yet again, we were wrong.
The Christmas run got good reviews on blogs and websites and little interest anywhere else. But it was enough to give us the confidence to commit to runs at the Brighton Fringe (which we drove down to in a tiny car, cramming five of us inside alongside a large cardboard tank), the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival (where we spent the morning after the final performance burying Áine’s mum’s cat who had died in the night), Latitude Festival (where I accidentally left my computer out during a thunderstorm and spent the day of the show painstakingly downloading each sound cue onto a friend’s laptop using the slowest internet known to man), and finally the Edinburgh Fringe…
Our friend Andy Leitch was co-producing the show with Aine for Off the Kerb, we booked a too-large venue in the hope that we might get close to filling it on the weekends, we spent hours on Facebook and Twitter trying to contact anyone and everyone who might be interested in coming to the show. Matt took to the streets every morning in full Maggie regalia and wandered the cobbles of Edinburgh, promoting the show for hours. I’d been to the fringe before. I knew how hard you had to work, flyering for shows that people had little interest in, and how triumphant it was to have days where you got a good crowd… Queen of Soho sold out on the third night and never stopped. People applauded as the lights dimmed at the beginning, they laughed, booed the villains, aawed the sad bits, sang along with Maggie and waited for photos outside, we added extra shows at 1:30 in the morning, comedians, politicians and pop stars came to see it. It was one of the most exhilarating highs I’ve ever experienced, watching audience after audience respond to this show that had started as a Halloween joke.
Since then, a lot has changed. We’ve toured the show around the UK and to other continents, we’ve created sequels and spin-offs, I’ve written and directed other plays, Matt has forged a career as an actor and comedian, to be honest, we thought we’d probably put Maggie to bed a few years ago, particularly when we collaborated on a work in progress of Matt’s new autobiographical one-man show Sequins and Lies in March 2020… after which, in case you don’t remember, the world stopped for a while.
When lockdown was easing this year, our producer James Seabright asked us if we’d be interested in doing a short run of the show in the West End. Of course, Matt and I both told him that we would love to. After a year spent isolated from other people, watching Zoom readings and online theatre, we wanted to be back doing something where the audience needs to be there, that thrives on their response, that changes every night, and most importantly something that’s fun and escapist and joyful… we wanted to do Maggie
Since its inception, Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho was the little show that could. It started as a scrappy short play, evolved into a sleeper hit at the fringe and now is approaching its West End debut. It’s been a strange journey to get here, one filled with late nights, funny stories, odd tour dates, new friendships, old squabbles, surprises, disappointments and second chances. It’s certainly not the conventional route to the West End. Along the way, we haven’t stopped working, and we’ve tried our best to keep the show fresh – both in terms of new topical jokes and boosting the production values to fit the new surroundings. But at its heart, it’s still the same old deliberately silly show that first premiered 8 years ago in a small pub theatre in Battersea. It’s still the script we wrote to make each other laugh, even though it dealt with a subject matter we both felt passionately about. It’s still got the homemade vibe of a show that was first rehearsed in someone’s living room. And, most importantly, it’s still got Matt, giving a performance every bit as irreverent, fresh and hilarious as the one he first gave in that small theatre above a pub all those years ago.
The only question that remains is, now that he’s made it to the West End off the back of one Halloween costume, what will he wear to my party this year…?
Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho runs at London’s Garrick Theatre from the 19th – 21st August https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/shows/margaret-thatcher-queen-of-soho/
