Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Artwork: Alan Rutherford
DEAD SHEEP
Jonathan Maitland’s play about
Tory treachery and Maggie the temptress: how 80s politics
inspired a script for Brexit Britain
My play Dead Sheep, about Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe,
already included a prime minister’s downfall, a machinating wife and an
ambitious blond maverick. Reworking it since the referendum has been a
writer’s dream
When I asked the BBC’s former chief political correspondent John
Sergeant for advice about my play Dead Sheep in 2014 he told me
colourfully but gently that I was wasting my time. John, a former
colleague, had a point. Who’d be interested in a play about Geoffrey
Howe and Margaret Thatcher, especially as Thatcher’s story had already
been explored in dramas like The Iron Lady, The Long Walk to Finchley
and The Audience?
But I felt those productions had missed a trick, for understandable
dramatic reasons, in treating Howe as a jealous, pompous, bitpart
player. I had always thought there was much more to him. His
relationship with Thatcher was also the most effective way, I believed,
to examine the flaws and qualities of the woman who moulded modern
Britain.
59
SEPTEMBER 2016