Handbagged

For the second time this year, the Queen is on the stage with her first minister, Margaret Thatcher. Brought to magisterial life by Helen Mirren in Peter Morgan’s entertaining The Audience, she’s now twice the woman – literally, in Moira Buffini’s funny, fascinating Handbagged. While an insufficiently assured and nothing-like-posh-enough Clare Holman plays a tense, uncertain younger Queen, Marion Bailey is magnificent as our monarch as she is now – mellow and matronly and very stylish in marigold yellow. Lips zipped, her hilarious expressions reveal that she was very seldom in agreement with ‘that bloody woman’.

The play speculates about 11 years of weekly private meetings between the most powerful women in Britain at the time – which appear to have been anything but a cosy cup of tea and exchange of mutual sympathy. To remind us that it’s guesswork, the younger and older versions of the same character occasionally squabble about what actually happened.

Emphasising the ‘playfulness’, the two actors playing Denis, Mrs T’s cabinet and even Nancy and Ronald Reagan, frequently remind us that they are acting. Mrs T gets confused when Jeff Rawle slips into the role of Peter Carrington: ‘Are you Denis or not?’ ‘I’m not,’ he confesses. ‘How dare you attempt to impersonate him?’ says the outraged Iron Lady, on the point of handbagging the poor man.

When Mrs T starts ranting about the miners’ strike and the Queen expresses her dismay at the destruction of people’s livelihoods, rather than come to blows, the Queen insists on an interval. The tireless and pitiless Mrs T would have cheerfully gone on and on and on.

Mrs T’s bag is large, black and patent; the Queen’s a more elegant leather, and less of an obvious weapon. But these women had more in common than their handbags. Mothers, wives, born within six months of one another, they were from the same era. Both were strongly influenced by their fathers; both wanted the best for Britain. And yet, they were so different.

‘Will you be bringing any pets to Number 10?’ asks the Queen. ‘I thought if she’s got a dog, we’ve got a subject.’ They never had a subject. While staying at Balmoral, Mrs T kicks a corgi. She loathed the place, with its wellies and picnics, as ferociously as she hated socialism.

Fenella Woolgar is superb as the husky younger Maggie, buttoned up in royal blue, who practically prostrates herself before a startled Her Maj, then kisses her hand. As the more strident older Lady T, Stella Gonet’s impersonation is almost spookily accurate. A dead-cert for a West End transfer.

Until 16 November at Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6: 020-7328 1000, www.tricycletheatre.co.uk