Review: Maggie & Me

It is not easy for art, rooted within one medium, to transcend its source and achieve equal salience within an adjacent medium. The well-trod path from page to stage is littered with an unintended dialectic between literature and performance. Curatorial precision is required at all times. This is perhaps most true when considering the memoir: a medium which confers unto the reader the intimacy of personal insight.  

Published in 2013, Damian Barr’s Maggie & Me describes the life of a young boy growing up in Motherwell: one of many deindustrialised landscapes cluttering Thatcher’s Britain during the 1980s. The construct of the book is a series of Thatcher quotations doubling as chapter titles. It is not hard, therefore, to see the challenge Barr and James Ley had to translate this work to stage.

This NTS production commences with DB (Gary Lamont) informing his husband (Douglas Rankine) that he has secured a publishing contract to write the story of his young self, Wee DB (a winning Sam Angell). It is only then he realises that was the easy part. Transcribing his memories to page is not an exercise in memory recall, but in reliving events. Can Brighton-based Barr confront his worst Motherwell misery? What follows is the story behind the story. This meta-approach confers an escape from the more obvious one-person testimony as well as an ontology of truth: the beliefs and facts coalescing in the many corners of DB’s mind. The order of events does not matter. What follows is a melange of reprised memories, characters, news reels (real and imagined) and a peripatetic Thatcher (Beth Marshall) as a character who threads them all. She’s on the telly. She’s in the library. She’s in the family home. She’s behind you! But which is she? The witch who takes his father’s livelihood? Or the fairy godmother here to rescue Wee DB? She is, of course, both. A clearer delineation between ‘national’ Thatcher and ‘Wee DB’ Thatcher could have fore fronted a humorous dialectic between the nanny and the woman who spent her entire political life railing against the nanny-state. Despite Marshall’s obvious talents, each appearance diminishes Thatcher of her potency. And at a run-time of close to 3 hours, there are a lot of Thatcher entrances.

Barr has described the play as “a hall of mirrors”. And within this hall we find characters suspended for whole tracts of stage time awaiting their cue to speak. Whilst other characters come and go, never to be seen again: the librarian, the therapist, the sex education teacher, the PE teacher. A scene featuring Thatcher as a quiz show host adds nothing but run-time. By the time we find out DB’s worst nightmare, apologetically, I was more than eager to leave a hot and crammed auditorium. This is a great pity because somewhere in this hall of mirrors is an absorbing 75 minute play. The rest, unfortunately, is exposition.

Maggie & Me runs 8th – 11th May at The Tron, Glasgow. Then until 15th Jun in Inverness, Perth, Cumbernauld, Dundee, Northampton and Edinburgh.