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A culture warrior before her time, Mary Whitehouse was a mid-century media phenomenon. A housewife activist fulminating against sin, she backed forcefully into the limelight while cooing that she was just “a grandmother who collects pebbles for a hobby”.
Why gift her another moment in the spotlight? Homophobia and evangelical legislation have newly sharpened teeth, so Caroline Bird’s witty new play feels timely, as it peers under the bonnet of the campaigner’s self-promotion and asks what it feels like to be running on moral conviction.
Bird’s Whitehouse often sounds like one of Victoria Wood’s redoubtable monsters, twinkling about ramekins and pebble-dashed with prejudice. In her salmon pink turtleneck, slingbacks and jazzy two-pieces (“The gays were not expecting that”), Maxine Peake is all homely chuckles, her toes tapping as her rhetoric revs up. She’d be camp if she weren’t so adamantine, and if Bird didn’t take her so seriously.
Whitehouse campaigned against porn and Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain, but the play circles her views on homosexuality and private prosecution of Gay News for a blasphemous poem (“He does WHAT to the dead body of Christ?”). Samuel Barnett, swathed in 1970s shades of mushroom and mustard, plays all the supporting roles, confronting Whitehouse with a succession of distressed parents, conflicted gay people and strong-viewed women.
Visiting Margaret Thatcher, Whitehouse runs a doubtful finger over the Downing Street sideboard but receives a cold shoulder after hauling out a tupperware of sex toys (“Do you know what a butt plug is?”). The Tories don’t need a crank to devise Section 28. Other encounters, hinging on maternal tension, briefly wobble Whitehouse’s world view: her mother’s boho reinvention and an interview with the Guardian’s Jill Tweedie that stumbles into fraught revelation.
It’s an ample play, in Sarah Frankcom’s steady-paced production – you sense that scenes were shuffled to fit so much material. Despite Peter Butler’s deft period costumes, you can’t ignore the contemporary tang of intransigent conservatism and its strange persecution complex.
Tears and pained confessions can’t dent Whitehouse’s sense of purpose. Peake’s smile seems progressively stranger – a taut line of defence against doubt. Bird uncovers a moralist who is a stranger to herself, impervious even to her own pain.
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At Nottingham Playhouse until 27 September
