Lloyd Evans
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The movie uses the endgame flashback device. We start with Lady Thatcher in her dotage, suffering hallucinations as she struggles to sort out her dead husband’s clothes. Her disintegrating mind takes us back through the key episodes in her career. ‘There’s nothing controversial about the bits of the political plot that we were showing,’ says Lloyd. ‘If we were trying to change people’s opinions it was more, perhaps, to have empathy for old people rather than to vote for David Cameron.’
Her most startling discovery about the Thatcher ascendancy came from a colleague who knew her at the time of the Heath coup. ‘I asked him which was the more significant point of division between her and the men she took on: that she was female or that she was lower-middle class? He said, unquestionably, the fact that she was lower-middle class. Those men, the survivors of Heath’s Cabinet, had all been born and bred to imagine that they might be prime minister, while she had never contemplated being leader, let alone PM. So there she was, sitting in the big chair, the nightmare from which they thought they would soon wake up, but in fact it took 16 years. And most of them were gone by then.’
Lloyd declines, perfectly properly, to reveal which members of the Thatcher circle she consulted. ‘Norman Tebbit complained the other day that we hadn’t applied to speak to him. If we’d had five years to prepare, we’d have spoken to every MP. It wasn’t a conscious omission.’ She found the keepers-of-the-flame surprisingly accommodating. ‘Everyone we approached was happy to talk to us, given that they hadn’t read the script, had no idea of what we were doing, or of our credentials.’
Is her plan to reclaim Margaret Thatcher from the people who hate her guts? Or to rehabilitate her? ‘Definitely not. I was somebody who spent the 1980s working in subsidised theatre so I had absolutely no objective that I was…’, she trails off here but seems to imply that she was aiming for ideological neutrality. She expected criticism, ‘from both extremes. We assumed the right would be upset because we were showing her as an old and frail person. The left would be furious because Meryl [Streep] would make us empathise.’
She may be affected by Maggie-fatigue but Lloyd has oodles of time for Meryl. ‘She gives a director every possible option and every possible support,’ she says, ‘not just during the shoot but right through to the moment [the film] is delivered.’ Streep’s portrayal of Thatcher is eerily accurate. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it’s a performance of astounding technique, inner life, empathy, courage, a kind of fearlessness, an understanding of leadership. Meryl is a great leader,’ she goes on. ‘She knows that a great leader is the last man standing. That is Meryl. She leads not by making a noise, not by making a fuss, not by banging a big drum, but by just being more prepared, working harder, having more energy, having more ideas, having a vision.’ The Streep vision is ‘huge’, I discover. ‘A vision of who she’s speaking to, as an actor, who’s out there, watching this, listening to it. When she’s creating a part, she goes way beyond, “I’m sitting here. And Geoffrey Howe’s there. And the camera’s there.” It’s sort of, “what is happening in Darfur? And how does this resonate with the world beyond?” It’s very inspiring.’
Like Maggie, Meryl was not the most obvious choice for the role she played. And her interloper status lent an extra frisson to the House of Commons scenes. Lloyd recruited serving Tory whips to help the actors replicate the uproar of the chamber in full cry. ‘The whips came and literally whipped everybody into a frenzy… and when Meryl first appeared as Prime Minister there were 300 British actors staring at her and thinking, “She’s American. Can she do this?” And, just as Margaret Thatcher did, she had to work on her voice, work on her hair, work on her presentation, and be ten times more prepared than the men in order not to be caught out. It was an exact mirror. The outsider playing the outsider. That added something. It added fear. On both sides.’ Streep’s extraordinary performance won everyone over. The actors playing Cabinet ministers started to dub themselves ‘the Moths’ because they were ‘drawn to the flame’ of Meryl.
Well-loved British thesps impersonate Tory grandees. Ted Heath is portrayed by John Sessions as a lovable One Nation numbskull. Geoffrey Howe is played by a slightly muted Anthony Head, who discussed the role extensively with Howe before the shoot. At a preview screening that I attended, loud guffaws were heard when Richard E. Grant swaggered into shot as Michael Heseltine. I ask if Tarzan had a chance to chat to Withnail about ‘his motivation’? She giggles. ‘I don’t think so.’ From private sources she has heard that Lady Thatcher regards the film with monumental indifference. ‘Ah, another programme,’ was her reputed response.
Finally I ask Lloyd if she has another film in development. She lights up. It’s as if spring sunshine has flooded the room. ‘I don’t know!’ she beams. ‘I’m unemployed.’
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