The play is set in 1983, the year before the real attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher with the IRA’s Brighton bomb.
The plot is simple enough. Caroline, a middle aged divorced, childless black woman living in an upstairs flat in plush Windsor, lets Brendan, a young twenty-something male with a Liverpool accent into her home because she believes him to be the plumber she’d been expecting to fix her boiler. He is carrying a bag that she assumes contains his tools.
It soon emerges the bag in fact contains a rifle, and her flat had been selected because her window provides the ideal vantage point from which to shoot Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as she leaves an engagement visiting a hospital across the road. Brendan was to await three rings of Caroline’s telephone as a signal that Thatcher was leaving the hospital, at which point he would ready himself in position to fire.
Format
The play is a two-hander between 0’ Neil as Brendan and Reynolds’ as Caroline, with them also briefly taking on some minor parts towards the end.
The stage is arranged as a studio flat, simple but nice, and suitably vintage, with a kitchen area, a small table with two chairs, a double bed, and a bathroom/toilet behind a door.
Act One features a near-continuous dialogue between the two characters, with much witty dialogue. Through this we learn all we need to know about their respective lives.
At one point, Brendan does briefly tie Caroline’s hands to prevent her escape while he uses the toilet. He also threatens to gag her and makes it clear that he prepared to use violence against her if necessary, and does use some mild violence when she tries to thwart his plan by hiding the magazine from his gun in the sugar bowl.
But it’s always clear that he doesn’t really want to do this and, although he responds to her raising the possibility of him hitting one of the nurses or doctors by mistake as they shake hands with Thatcher as merely ‘collateral damage,’ he obviously doesn’t want this to happen either. His target is Thatcher, and nobody else.
Both Brendan and Caroline are, in different ways, both very sympathetically written and portrayed.
Themes
Brendan’s motivations are revealed through his dialogue with Caroline. Though the organisation he is working for is never named, he speaks passionately of the IRA Hunger Strikers, rattling off their names when Caroline insists that, besides Bobby Sands, nobody even remembers them. But mass unemployment, which then stood at three million in the UK, and the lack of a future for young people like himself and his nine-year-old nephew are also revealed as primary motivations. The previous years Falklands War is also referenced, the sinking of the Belgrano as it was sailing away from British forces, and the sinking of HMS Sheffield in response by the Argentinians.
A sub-theme is of how the relationship between a captor and a hostage can develop into a bond. Understandably, Caroline is at first terrified at finding she has invited an armed would-be assassin into her home. But as the play develops, this bond between the two quickly grows. She takes an interest in his life, making it very clear that she is no lover of the Prime Minister herself.
The casting of a black woman as Caroline is in itself interesting, undercutting Brendan’s inverted snobbery against the sort of people who live in leafy Windsor, far away from the problems of both working class Liverpool and the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland. Brendan expresses no racism towards Caroline, but he is clearly surprised that she is able to identify a poem he quotes to her as being by Yates (which cues up a good line from Caroline about Yates believing in fairies, and thus, ‘not the ideal person to take political instruction from’). It would have been easy choice to have the character of Caroline be the sort of upper class or upper middle-class woman we imagine lives in Windsor. Making her black added an extra dimension to the story, which I assume is also the case in Mantel’s original source material.
Although she attempts to dissuade Brendan from his chosen path through verbal persuasion, as well as the physical attempt by hiding his magazine, it’s also clear that she is increasingly excited by suddenly finding herself at the centre of a potentially historic moment. When Brendan tells her that, when the time comes she can wait in the bathroom until it’s all over, she responds with, ‘No, I want to see it! I’m not missing this,’ which received probably the biggest of many laughs from the near packed theatre audience.
Another theme that is present is the question of whether individual acts of violence, no matter how justified or heroic, ever really change anything. ‘So, you kill her, they put in Willie Whitelaw or ‘On Your Bike’, and everything carries on as before.’
Tonal Shift
Brendan was resigned to his mission being a suicide mission. He had no plans to escape, and fully expected to be shot dead as soon as he exited the building after the deed had been done. But he shows openness to Caroline’s suggestion that the possibility of escape may exist through leaving her flat and entering an adjoining flat via two doors linked by a passageway, although she has never personally made this journey.
As the two leave the flat, the play takes a surrealistic turn that closes Act One and continues through most of the shorter Act Two.
Here we see the two actors play out, in increasingly rapid succession, each one punctuated by several effigies of Thatcher crashing to the floor of the stage from above, various alternative scenarios. These include, Brendan really missing his shot and hitting a surgeon rather than the Prime Minister, Brendan indeed being shot dead as he leaves the flat after a successful assassination, Brendan being visited in prison by his uncomprehending nine-year-old nephew, who has been established as the one person Brendan truly loves. In another universe, a grown-up version of the nephew poses proudly for tourists by a Bobby Sands-style mural for his martyred uncle (it might have been better if we’d seen this mural, but this is a minor criticism). In yet another possible world, Caroline has become something of a celebrity in the aftermath of the event, expressing her surprise at being interviewed by David Frost, and also finding herself being condemned as a ‘terrorist’ herself for her refusal to condemn Brendan. I thought there was an implied criticism of the recent proscription of a certain pro-Palestinian organisation here, especially as Caroline chants ‘Fight this law!’ at the audience.
This sudden tonal shift from the almost homely scene in the flat was disconcerting, making for feelings of shock and unease among the audience, or so it seemed to me, but it was very effective.
Finally, this bombardment of the senses is resolved and we end up back in Caroline’s flat, as the phone rings three times and the shot is fired.
Conclusion
This is a very political play, but one which offers no easy answers or moral certainties.
I won’t give away the ending, of whether or not Brendan is successful or not in his mission. I’ll simply finish by saying that this was a great play, superbly written and directed, gripping, humorous and thought provoking. Full compliments to all concerned, especially to our two actors.
After they had taken their well-deserved standing ovation, O’ Neil spoke briefly but movingly about how seeing a play a play at this theatre as a young working class kid twenty-years ago had first raised in him the possibility of, and desire to become an actor. The Everyman is a superb venue and theatre company, and has been the starting point for many great Liverpool actors, including Julie Walters, Bill Nighy, Pete Poselthwaite, Stephen Graham, Alison Steadman, David Morrissey and Ken Campbell with his legendary Science Fiction Theatre in the early 1960s (a topic which deserves its own article).
Long may it continue.
Anthony C Green, May, 2026
The play continues at the Everyman until May 23rd, and will hopefully soon be touring across the country.
