REVIEW: Handbagged at Harrogate Theatre

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Lauren Crisp is a book editor, writer and keen follower of arts and culture. She reviews theatre and cultural events in and around the district in her spare time.

You can contact Lauren on laurencrispwriter@gmail.com. 

For 11 years, two rather important women, handbag in arm, met once a week over tea and scones. The late Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher were once upon a time bound by their power (and their choice of accessories), and in her play, Handbagged, Moira Buffini imagines the content of their conversations and speculates on the titillating tête-à-têtes that may have transpired as they navigated those politically tumultuous years.

Harrogate Dramatic Society (HDS) began their run of this fly-on-the-wall political comedy on Wednesday night. We meet not just two women, but four: Mags (Melanie James) is a younger version of the Iron Lady, joined by T (Gill McVey), her older counterpart. Kate Button plays the monarch in the early years of her reign as Liz, while Rosemary Enright conveys an older, rather cheekier, Q.

They bicker between and among themselves, the older counterparts often heckling their younger egos. It’s not all handbags at dawn, though, as these dual personas (which the four portray with wit, excellent comic timing and authentic accents), allow us a deeper insight into these women’s minds.

The four central cast members are joined by two more: Chris Kendall and Harry Satloka, who, between them, embody a slew of contemporary political figures. The audience is treated to a veritable merry-go-round of cameos, from Ronald Reagan to Kenneth Kaunda.

The pair, in a series of moments that break the play’s fourth wall, step outside of their roles to bicker over who should portray Neil Kinnock, as well as to debate the omission of certain moments in the play’s rendering of history. Their roles are transient in nature yet a crucial crux, the metatheatre lending the play even more interest and bringing it together into one round whole.

A lot has changed, of course, since the play was written over a decade ago, and HDS doesn’t shy away from inciting a few winces at the mention of a certain “favourite son”. There are titters aplenty, elicited particularly as Kendall totters, as Nancy Reagan, in towering stilettos, and when Satloka interprets Michael Hesseltine, flicking his long blonde wig, Spitting Image style.

A whirlwind tour of the Thatcher years, Handbagged depicts a compelling portrait of the relationship between two giants of twentieth-century British history – as well as providing a lot of laughs.

Handbagged is on at Harrogate Theatre until Saturday, February 28.