The story of Hilary Mantel imagining the assassination of Margaret Thatcher in Liverpool | stage

Hilary Mantel’s controversial story, which imagines the murder of Margaret Thatcher in the summer of 1983, is set to be shown next year in Liverpool.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – 6 August 1983 was published in The Guardian in 2014 and gave the title to Mantel’s short story collection that year. In the tale, a woman opens the front door to her apartment in a “neat corner” of Windsor waiting for a plumber, but finds a gunman entering. He is intent on using the location of her home to target the then Prime Minister, who is having eye surgery at a nearby private hospital.

Described as a psychological thriller, it is written by Alexandra Wood and will be directed by John Young at the Everyman Theater in May. “This is not just a play for people who have a strong opinion or feeling about Maggie Thatcher,” Young said. “It’s about class, about lives colliding, about people trying to come to terms, asking questions, coming together and bridging the gap. I also think it’s a play about what happens when people feel like they don’t have a voice, and how dangerous it can be when they feel like they have nothing to lose.”

Mantel’s story was inspired by her vision of Thatcher on the hospital grounds, in the titular date, from the author’s apartment in Windsor. “Instantly your eye measures the distance,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “I thought, if it wasn’t me, if it was someone else, she would be dead.”

In the year the story was published, Mantel was made a Dame and her Booker Prize-winning novels of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies were highly praised by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The next book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (2020), was co-written by Mantel and actor Ben Miles, who played Cromwell, for an RSC production in 2021. “I know now that I should have been doing this all my life,” Mantel said of the playwriting. The following year, she died at the age of 70 after suffering a stroke.

Despite acknowledging that Thatcher was “the stuff of drama herself”, it took Mantel 30 years to write the story inspired by her glimpse of the Prime Minister. It was published a year after Thatcher’s death. “I couldn’t see how to get there [the characters of the gunman, whose cause is “Ireland. Only Ireland” and the woman who is the narrator] “We must work together,” she said. “They must study their own myths and the myths of their communities. They each collude for their own reasons.”

After it was published, the story sparked some criticism, including from Conservative MPs, and there was a call for a police investigation into Mantle. The writer refused to respond, saying: “I think it would be unreasonable to say that this is something so dark that we cannot examine it. We cannot escape history. We have to confront it head-on, because the repercussions of Mrs Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation.”

“There are big themes about what Thatcher means to us now, what she meant, her relationship with a divided Britain. And of course the relationship between Thatcher and Liverpool,” Young said in the play. The sniper has what the narrator describes as a Liverpool accent. The story is set at a time of continuing industrial decline in the seaside town, two summers after the Toxteth riots, which prompted the Prime Minister to appoint Michael Heseltine to the position of ‘Merseyside Minister’.

Young continued: “One of the great things about the Everyman space is that it can achieve both intimacy and immensity really well. I think that’s what this play does. You’re in a small apartment with just two people, but the ideas and themes they’re talking about are enormous. It’s about this apartment, but it’s also about the world.”

Wood’s previous plays include an adaptation of Kate Summerskill’s novel The Doubts of Mr Witcher, which runs at the Watermill Theater in Newbury in 2023. Casting for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which runs from May 2 to 23, has not yet been announced. The play is part of Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse’s new season, announced on Thursday, which includes Attachment by Julia Craney, a drama developed alongside adoptive families from Merseyside.