Handbagged at Dawn: Are transfers transforming the West End?

By E.J.Martin

London's main stages are currently fit to burst with things we have seen before. The West End is playing home to an astonishing raft of shows that are adapted from cult films of varying quality and artistic merit: The Bodyguard, The Commitments, Fatal Attraction, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mamma Mia, and we are soon to see Made In Dagenham, Back To The Future and Shakespeare In Love added to this smorgasbord too.

This might be enough to make you despair, plant your head firmly in your hands, and wonder if in our highly imitative and appropriation-prone society, it is finally true that 'nothing is original' and we are now destined to dilute and recycle other people's ideas forever. But I am here to tell you that innovation is not dead. It is being championed and protected by a small but mighty team of shows with humble beginnings, pieces that have grappled their way up the greased ladder from scratch nights and rooms above pubs to prove that this industry can still, sometimes, be a meritocracy. I want to talk to you about the power of the transfer.

Moira Buffini's Handbagged, newly opened at the Vaudeville Theatre, is probably best described as a 'political comedy', although it is much, much more than that. Handbagged began life as a short play that was staged alongside eight others at the Tricycle Theatre in 2010 as part of a season called 'Women, Power and Politics.’ It features older and a younger version of Margaret Thatcher ('Mags' and 'T') and Elizabeth II ('Liz' and 'Q'), and sees Buffini speculate about the conversations that might have been had between these two icons at key points in their shared history. The only other members of cast are two male actors who multi-role throughout and are known as simply 'Actor 1' and 'Actor 2'.

There is nothing sexy, commercial or particularly easy to sell about Handbagged. There are no musical numbers, no dancing girls, no-one flies in on wires or arrives on roller-skates (although there is a brief bit of cross-dressing). It's about power and the abuse of it, the difference between a natural-born leader and a someone literally born to lead. It's one of the most thorny and divisive periods in British politics turned into clever comedy. It is highly meta-theatrical: Actor 2 states at one point: "I'm playing several parts in this thing...some have only got one line and other are horrible, thin caricatures, but times are hard and it's a job.' Liz overrules Mags' desire to power through the show uninterrupted with: "I enjoy the interval, sometimes it's the best part of the play." It's 2 hours and 10 minutes where a great deal of the material is delivered as direct audience address in the manner of a televised speech or press-conference. It's sort of a satire, but not really, and sort of a love letter, but not really.

It's also blisteringly funny. It is the most captivating and entertaining history lesson you will ever have the privilege of experiencing, although the openly unreliable narrative of our driving forces makes it more than that - there are lots of events that are deliberately misremembered by our heroines in order to paint themselves in a more favourable light, lots of "that never happened", or "I never said that". It is a tight and nimble script from Buffini, delivered faultlessly by four impeccable leading ladies who have the unenviable job of embodying some of the most instantly recognisable people in the world, taking the caricatures of them we are so used to seeing in the press and breathing life and dimensions into them. All four actresses are triumphant, but Fenella Woolgar's performance as Mags in particular is something quite remarkable.

Bureaucracy, aristocratic and monarchical privilege, self-seeking individualism, free market economics, the social consequences of new Toryism - none of these sound like ripe material for a West End smash. Indeed, the fact that this show is in competition with so many rehashes of existing mass-appeal stories 'now with added dance routines' is particularly ironic when you consider the views expressed by Michael Billington in his seminal book State of the Nation about the musical's rise to prominence in the eighties. '[Musicals] had the potential, with the aid of intensive marketing, to marginalise other theatrical forms. They offered both escape from social reality and spiritual uplift..their wealth-making capacity and corporatism, musicals were the perfect expression of Thatcherite values.' Billington also suggests that Mrs Thatcher was aware of the myth-making potential of the popular musical, and hoped that her own brand of power and charisma might one day be immortalised in this way, a la Eva Peron. It is interesting then, that some the richest theatrical material to date about this woman and her world is not a musical, came from a subsidised sector of the arts, and sees her neither particularly vaunted nor vilified. It just sees her, warts and all.

I cannot stress how important it is that Handbagged - a play written by a woman, directed by a woman, about two of the most powerful women in the political history of the Western world - has pushed up through the ranks to make it to the West End. The fact that is helmed by four powerhouse women who have a hugely intimidating list of collective credits and have never appeared on I'm A Celebrity Big Brother Strictly Come Get Me Out Of Here is the icing on the proverbial cake. Handbagged is running at the same time as Twelve Angry Men is playing at The Garrick , a production which doesn't feature a single woman among the cast or key creatives. We have octogenarian Angela Lansbury heading up the hoary old Coward classic 'Blithe Spirit' to great acclaim, but we also have David Suchet about to play Lady Bracknell in Adrian Noble's new adaptation of The Importance Of Being Earnest, turning one of the most iconic roles for older actresses into a pantomime dame. When this is taken into consideration, the sterling work being done here by Bailey, Gonet, Robinson and Woolgar seems more important than ever.

A few days after the performance that I saw, Handbagged won a much-deserved Olivier award for 'Outstanding achievement in an affiliate theatre'. It was not the only garlanded David among the commercial Goliaths. The 325 seat Almeida theatre saw two of its shows transfer to the West End last year, Chimerica and Ghosts, and they picked up eight Oliviers between them for the subsidised theatre that conceived them, including the all-important Best New Play. This paves the way beautifully for their devastating 1984 to transfer to the Playhouse Theatre, and will, I predict, be followed by King Charles III (another searing comedy drama that proposes a speculative account of the state of the monarchy), which is already being heralded by Matt Trueman as 'the best new British play since Jerusalem'.

The Tricycle, birthplace of Handbagged, has just re-staged Red Velvet, a story based on the experiences of black actor Ira Aldridge, prior to its Broadway transfer. Let The Right One In is the raw and muscular offering from the Royal Court that was chosen to open the newly refurbished Apollo. It is, technically speaking, about vampires (although the v-word isn't uttered once), which is obviously pretty much the most commercially bankable idea in the history of the world in our post-Twilight times. But in reality, it is a difficult and gripping story about the most damaging kind of love, 100-year-old possible hermaphrodites, senseless bullying, bad parenting, and disfiguration by acid, complete with movement pieces directed by one of Complicite's leading lights. Good People has just opened at the Noel Coward Theatre, featuring the incomparable Imelda Staunton in the leading role of a single mother from Boston struggling to make end meet. This is a transfer from the Hampstead Theatre.

Handbagged is never going to shift as many tickets as Wicked, or Thriller, or The Bodyguard, whatever your feelings on the subject might be. But its presence on the West End is proof that change is afoot. There is increasing recognition in the commercial sector of the industry that from a small seed, a mighty trunk may grow. I am evangelical about the power and potential of the transfer - and I promise you that it's only a matter of time before you are a convert, too.

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