Dead Sheep review, Park Theatre

Perhaps we all sentimentalise the past, but I was surprised to find how much I longed for a return to the ding-dong politics of the Thatcher era during Jonathan Maitland's play, Dead Sheep. Driving home listening to the last of the Leaders Debate, our well rehearsed cohort were colourless in comparison to Maggie and her strange and often magnificent oppos - Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. How little divides left from right today. It is, as the man next to me commented during an across-our-row interval conversation, just branding. Coke or Pepsi; more sugar or less; more bubbles or fewer?

Dead Sheep is a very funny and interesting speculation about the toppling of Margaret Thatcher by Geoffrey Howe. Howe was the gentle, clever, Chancellor - later Foreign Secretary - with the dull, polite, delivery that led Labour Shadow Chancellor Denis Healy to remark that being attacked by Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. When, during his resignation speech, Howe shook off that mantle to reveal the wolf beneath, his words brought Mrs Thatcher's reign to an end.

Maitland's play, his first, is slick and clever and utterly plausible. He draws on his journalistic background to put the imagined relationship between Howe and his wife Elspeth under the microscope, suggesting the tension between the singular leader and a successful and outspoken party wife may have had some bearing on the eventual fallout. Under Ian Talbot's direction it's a lively and provocative production initially dominated by the brilliant Steve Nallon as Mrs Thatcher,  but slowly taken over by the Howes as the power shifts. James Wilby and Jill Baker are terrific as the troubled couple, and Tim Wallers, John Wark, and  Graham Seed expertly whip through characters from Alan Clark and Bernard Ingham to Ian Gow and Brian Walden. 

In conclusion: Dead Sheep is impossible to watch without wanting a discussion every five minutes. There is so much there. I worried it might be peculiarly interesting to those who remember the 1980s, but then met a young academic who spends her life studying Thatcher. It's a play about politics for anyone interested in politics. In the run up to an election, it's heaven.