AWKWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
The curtain is a marvel to start with: its plasticky-floral cosiness taking you straight to a 1970s kitchenette and the heyday of Mrs W’s mission to gather followers and stamp out the permissive society. And Maxine Peake appropriately does the Eric Morecambe peep-round that curtain, before emerging to tell us that people may want rid of her but she’s going nowhere.
It’s a canny opening for Caroline Bird’s mischievous but well researched and ultimately thoughtful play, deftly directed by Sarah Frankcom. Those of us who lived through the Whitehouse years (and interviewed her) can confirm that this aspiring moral-rearmer of a fast- changing post-60s nation was indeed, pure showbiz: happiest on a revivalist platform leading her Viewers And Listeners Association , as well as being a ferocious letter writer and scourge of the BBC. Even the Daleks were suspect, as was Dimbleby’s concentration camp report, and just about every play for today. Oh, and especially homosexuals, however mild and friendly. As the show begins, it deals first with that Whitehouse focus: the death threats she received, the demonstrations outside her house , the fury around her court battle when she defeated and broke Gay News.
I have to admit that the first half hour made me uneasily feel that Peake was channelling a British Edna Everage, or Patricia Routledge as Victoria Wood’s Kitty: any cartoonish middle-aged woman whose mouth turns down and purses, ending every condemnation with a self-satisfied little smile. Which at times is of course comedy gold: turning up at the Gay News trial in a pink chiffon scarf she preens “the gays were not expecting that!”. She certainly milks the horrified facial,expressions when the “blasphemous libel” poem is read out (a centurion having sex with the dead Christ). And of course the driest audience laugh comes when – absolutely factually – she praises her prosecuting barrister John Smyth for devotedly running Christian youth camps. Yes, that John Smyth:the abuser and flogger whose exposure two years ago finished off Justin Welby’s Archbishopric.
My qualms abated, though, in Peake’s several brilliantly executed onstage transformations (top wig work by Helen Keane). Whitehouse becomes her young self again, child of a broken marriage who fell for a married man, renounced him and joined a strict fringe evangelical movement to become a “soul surgeon” and convert others, especially gays, to recognizing and banishing their supposed innate depravity. Here Peake ceases the caricature, and at last inhabits a relatable reality: thereafter, as she matures or ages again all the way to a care home chair, she becomes more rounded : her faith and overweening confidence becomes something credible even if not shareable. As is the usefulness of her work on child pornography, sex shop displays and video horrors. And, now that identity politics has raged out of control, there’s a nice topical echo when Mary decries “this modern obsession with self, this “who I am””.
But my resistance evaporated even more because of the really remarkable, memorable performance of Samuel Barnett as her foil: he plays “everybody else”. He is various gay men , challenging her or being soul-surgeoned by her (one heartrending scene has him singing Bridge over Troubled Water, softening her momentarily before she briskly sends him home to pray forgiveness for his wickedness). He is also several barristers, the gay youth counsellor she calls a “virus”, and finally the nurse at her side in her last days. But he is also a nervous housewife with a gay daughter and very memorably Mrs Thatcher (at whom Mrs W indignantly brandishes dildos while the PM winces and points out that sex shops are legitimate small businesses) . Best of all,he becomes
Jill Tweedie, the Guardian feminist writer of the 1980s.
It is with these two conversations, notably the second, that the author explores the enraging , still relevant fact that some of what Mary fought – the extreme and ever more bestial porn, the sexualizing of children, the collapse of families – did need fighting. But – here’s the kicker – she forever framed it in the most inhumane, formulaic and cold- hearted of Christian regulation, and in an utter rejection of any artistic freedom, evocation and exploration. And became impossibly tightly overfocused on same-sex love, however truly loving and wholly humanly benign.
So because of that, it became impossible for others over decades since to speak against the very worst, the very nastiest and most destructive pornographies without being tarred with the Whitehouse brush, and dismissed as philistine prudes. She still casts a shadow. Which is why the play was worth doing. And Barnett, throughout, admirably represents the rest of us…
Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk. to 27 sep
Rating 4
theatreCat 