Review: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher at Liverpool Everyman ****1/2

As titles go, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is certainly an arresting one.

And, as the Everyman itself allows, a provocative one too – just as it was when Hilary Mantel’s controversial short story on which this new production is based was first published 12 years ago.

Of course, the IRA tried it for real when they bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton in the early hours of October 12, 1984, missing Margaret Thatcher but murdering five, including Eric Taylor, manager of a Warrington data marketing company and chairman of the North West Conservative Association.

Mantel’s blackly, bleakly comic fictional short, bursting on to the Everyman stage in an audacious adaptation by playwright Alexandra Wood, is set the previous year when Maggie, fresh from a resounding win at the polls, was admitted to hospital for an op on a detached retina.

Waiting for her to leave are the nation’s press, a line-up of hospital staff and, behind the window of a neighbouring flat, a young working-class Liverpudlian with a rifle and a grudge.

But what has caused him to inveigle his way into the home of its unwitting owner, the voluble, middle aged, seemingly middle-class divorcee Caroline (Anita Reynolds)? And can she do anything to stop him executing his plan? A second, more complicated question, in a story where there are many shades of grey between the black and white, is how much does she really want to?

Robbie O’Neill (who previously appeared at the Ev, somewhat ironically, in Lizzie Nunnery’s To Have to Shoot Irishmen) is Brendan, the Scouse Lee Harvey Oswald, whose single-minded, bloody-minded focus on his mission – to kill Mrs Thatcher – is disrupted by the probing and reasoning of his home-owning hostage.

Above: Caroline (Anita Reynolds) and Brendan (Robbie O'Neill) in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Top: O'Neill as Brendan. Photos by Marc Brenner.

Brendan and Caroline spar, but also find some common ground, as they wait for the Iron Lady to emerge, the narrative ranging through ideas of power and powerlessness, prejudice, class, idealism and who is ‘on the right side of history’. Some of it is provoking, some through-provoking and some is the kind of stubborn and naïve binary absolutism you find in diatribes on social media.

It’s never really explained how Brendan has got himself mixed up with some sort of Republican paramilitary outfit or, as Caroline asks, why if they were going to try and take out the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, they’d choose some random Scouser to do it.

If all that all sounds a bit heavy duty, it’s skilfully handled by energetic director John Young - whose long-planned passion project this tense psychological two-hander appears to be, and alleviated by the terrific O’Neill and Reynolds who deliver Mantel/Wood’s dryly witty one liners with impeccable coming timing.

and if the first half, with its action concentrated in the parallel rooms of Caroline’s suburban flat, feels like a claustrophobic, reverse Rear Window, the second opens in what seems to be a disquieting, parallel universe where what unfolds can only be described as an astonishing, extended fever dream.

Above: "It's a great place to get a shot." Anita Reynolds' Caroline at the window. Photo by Marc Brenner.

Chapeau to Young and the cast and hats off also to Ceci Calf whose ingenious set design allows the director to achieve his wildly surreal and entertaining vision.

Perhaps it’s a homage to the real-life hospital ‘morphine dream’ during which a hallucinating Hilary Mantel reputedly visualised the narrative arc of her original story.

The novelist herself had no time for Mrs T. She famously described feeling “boiling detestation” for her.

Similarly, the received wisdom is that all Liverpudlians loathe the Tories and nurture a special hatred for the late ‘Iron Lady’. But as Algy says in The Importance of Being Earnest, the truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Take the political landscape in the Liverpool of 1983 for example. Militant took control of the city council (from a Tory-Liberal coalition), and the city returned five Labour MPs - and Liberal David Alton - to Westminster. Yet behind the headlines, a total of 79,827 Liverpudlians voted Tory in the General Election, securing the party nearly 30% of the vote in the city and coming second in every constituency.

There’s a passing mention of the will of the electorate late on in Wood’s adaptation as Caroline wheels through arguments in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade an intractable Brendan from his mission.

Does she succeed? We the audience are kept guessing right up to the final moment.