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 Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood |
State funeral? Maggie was pits
FOR the first time in his life, Ed Waugh is praying for Margaret Thatcher’s good health.
It’s a strange feeling for the 50-year-old playwright from the ex-mining town of South Shields in Tyneside. But Waugh and his writing partner Trevor Wood have just penned a play about the death of the Iron Lady.
“The irony is we don’t want her to die, because if she dies the play dies with it,” says Waugh.
In a departure from their international hit comedies (Dirty Dusting and Waiting for Gateaux), Maggie’s End, which plays at the Shaw Theatre in Euston next week, centres on a question frequently floated in political circles: whether Thatcher deserves a state funeral. Her death opens the play. “From our point of view as playwrights this is absolutely combustible material,” says Waugh. “Twenty-five years ago my family and friends stood on a picket line, giving up our wages and our money for the cause of the miners. We have lost the shipbuilding, steel and manufacturing industries – we’re reaping the evil wind of what the Tories did in the 1980s.
“The scars of the 1980s still run deep in industrial areas. When New Labour give her a state funeral it will reopen the scars. This play is about personal and political betrayal. About New Labour’s betrayal of working people.”
The play came to the attention of the unions at its premiere in the mining heartland of Durham 18 months ago.
It arrives in London with the backing of RMT, Unison, Unite and GMB.
Waugh, a former political researcher and journalist, is open in his condemnation of the former Prime Minister and blames her, among many things, for the current economic crisis. But the playwright insists the play is “a proper drama, not propaganda” about a family torn between its socialist father and New Labour daughter in charge of organising Thatcher’s funeral.
Waugh adds: “Thatcher starved families. That’s why there is real hatred. We wanted to tell young people just what Thatcher was like.
“I would like to see a Labour government do for working people what she did for the greedy, selfish minority.”
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