The Play

Handbags at the ready! Two of the most powerful women in the world met behind closed doors once a week for eleven years.  How might these meetings have gone down? Oh to have been a fly on the wall!

Handbagged is an imagining of the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and her Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during these weekly audiences.  It is a sharply funny political satire told in a Meta theatrical style.  There are two Queens and two Thatchers, younger and older versions.  They comment throughout the play on such major events of the time as the loss of the empire, the meaning of society, the miners’ strike, the Falklands war, the IRA bombings and apartheid, to mention just a few. Their older and younger selves regularly contradict each other's recollections of conversations, and at various times try to rush through aspects of their shared history that they would rather not revisit.  Helping to recreate events are two actors playing multiple supporting characters, sometimes halting proceedings to provide context for the audience, often against the wishes of the main characters.