A running length of 100 minutes for The Last Days of Liz Truss? amounts to about two minutes for each day its subject served as prime minister. By the same measure, a drama about Margaret Thatcher – Truss’s heroine, her portrait hanging from the set – would last almost a week. That would be a sum as untenable as those in the budget that led to a premiership of such brevity, whereas this monologue written by Greg Wilkinson enjoyably justifies its economics.
Truss’s time in the post in 2022 has already been detailed in four books including her own Ten Years to Save the West, Anthony Seldon’s Truss at No 10: How Not to Be Prime Minister, Tim Shipman’s Out and Kingmaker by Sir Graham Brady, who as chair of the 1922 committee, was the Tory executioner. Having read them all (a slightly alarming realisation), I can testify that Wilkinson has expertly filleted the history to comic (the politician’s passion for karaoke) and serious (her apocalyptic patriotism and economics) effect.
The conceit is that Truss lectures us as she awaits Brady’s knock on the door. Emma Wilkinson Wright nicely captures Truss’s awkward walk and excitable talk, including the hard “g” sound, though not attempting the random ambushing cackle. The psychological arc is how childhood overconfidence developed into a belief that being told she was wrong – especially by civil servants – proved her correct.
A consequence of the soliloquy form is that Truss appears on her own terms. Tourists might goggle at how a country’s voters ever let this politician reach the top, but they didn’t: Truss reached No 10 through 81,326 Conservative party members to whose prejudices her campaign was tooled. Claiming to have been removed from power by the “deep state”, she had been put there by a shallow faction. The biggest lesson from the mess involves the rules Tories use to change a PM between an election, but Truss would never recognise that.
The only external perspective is a soundtrack of recorded voices by impressionist Steve Nallon, including his Thatcher, a party piece since Spitting Image, but also take-offs of Kwasi Kwarteng, Jacob Rees-Mogg and generic officials and journalists.
Always alert to the comedy of Truss’s character and career, Wilkinson allows her a defence, showing how she was thrown by presiding over the death of the Queen and including Truss’s view (reflected by Shipman) that the Treasury was slow to advise of the risk to the budget from overexposed pension funds.
The Last Days of Liz Truss? explores, in its title, the possibility of a Trump-like comeback. While she waits, the politician has signed with a speaking agency but anyone wanting to hear from her would do better to book Wilkinson Wright’s standout stand-in.
• At White Bear theatre, London, until 14 December
