How would you feel about having the most intimate and dramatic moments of your life put on stage? Would audiences think that this partly fictionalised account was all true? With that weighing heavy on my head and heart, I went to see the opening night of the play Bloody Difficult Women, whose title referred to Theresa May and myself. It was the oddest mix of emotions. The apprehension I felt was almost akin to awaiting a supreme court verdict.
The play was not what I was expecting, and makes the point that May and I have certain things in common. We are both details people, we work hard, our lives have been shaped by difficult experiences, and we have had to make our way in male-dominated worlds: for me, the City and activism; for her, politics.
It also highlighted another similarity: we both recognise that while sticks and stones can break our bones, words and abuse meant to destroy us rarely does. May, when informed about the play that focuses on my successful court case against her government – an action aimed at upholding the sovereignty of the UK parliament – was sanguine. She felt no need to demand to see playwright Tim Walker’s script, or to make any attempt to check it for factual accuracy or how she was portrayed.
My attitude was precisely the same, and I think maybe that’s because women have a greater sense of themselves – we have grown accustomed to certain levels of criticism or abuse if we ever put our heads above the parapet. And we both understand the importance of freedom of expression.
It struck me as profoundly ironic therefore that the only real-life character featured in the play to make a fuss about it should be Paul Dacre – who, as editor of the Daily Mail when I began my case in 2016, had his media group’s legal department fire off innumerable letters to its producers demanding to see the script. These were, quite rightly, declined. When I think of some of the appalling things Dacre published about me – even suggesting at one point that, like Joan of Arc, I should be burned at the stake – and the abuse they engendered, I realise this is a man who can dish it out but clearly can’t take it.
Still, on the night I saw the play, I admit it was often very painful seeing my own life enacted on stage. Tim has been a friend of mine for many years – and still is – but I know that as a writer his need to create a dramatically compelling piece would, to some degree, outweigh concerns about my feelings.
His play gets into intensely personal issues about my own life – as it does May’s – which I found very difficult to watch. Somehow seeing your life played out on a stage made the things that happened to me feel more real – especially as I am someone who has survived by refusing to stay down when others have knocked me down. The dramatisation also brought home to me how abhorrent the Daily Mail had been to dig into my family’s past to see if there were any skeletons.
I appreciate a lot of my own backstory – as well as May’s – had to be condensed in a play that runs to only an hour and a half, but I regretted, for instance, that no mention was made of why my parents sent me to Great Britain from British Guyana when I was still a child. My father, the attorney general, had been fighting a dictator and corrupt government, which had made him powerful enemies and put my and my eldest brother’s lives in danger. On a lot of the smaller details, however – my love of cricket and crisps, for instance, and my husband Alan’s penchant for appalling jokes – the play is spot on.
The real eye-opener for me about the play, however, was seeing the portrayal of Dacre in the Daily Mail office as my case got under way, and how I became, so far as he was concerned, an “enemy of the people”. In this regard, I know the playwright was writing from a position of knowledge – Tim worked for Dacre for 10 years, and present employees of the paper tell me he has captured the essence of the man. The play makes it clear that making my life a misery was all part of a game to him.
After I saw the play, it took a while to process what I had just seen. Several people came up to me and said they had no idea quite what had been going on behind the scenes during my cases against May’s and later Boris Johnson’s governments. I had been for them simply this strong woman who had successfully taken two governments to court.
I had a surreal encounter with Amara Karan – the very gifted and generous actor who portrays me in the play – and I was struck by how diligently she had done her research, and how we also had a lot in common. She had worked in the City – as I still do – before she switched careers and went into acting owing to the misogyny she too had encountered. She asked me if I was OK. I gave her a hug.
Ultimately, I would never have wanted a play to be put on about me. I am not sure I would wish the ordeal on anyone. But I accept its heart is in the right place.
For it is important in this week of International Women’s Day for society and its institutions to accept that women must not be bullied or intimidated. We have a rightful place in all walks of life, including in positions of power.
• Gina Miller is a transparency campaigner and leader of the True and Fair party
• Bloody Difficult Women is running at the Riverside Studios in west London until 26 March
