Three Tall Tales - and all true

Either the Media know something that the rest of us don't, or there's been a tremendous fashion just lately for Margaret Thatcher tributes or programmes about her legacy (30 years after she first came to power). A few months back there was The Long Road to Finchley with Andrea Riseborough (whom I saw in the English Civil War drama The Devil's Whore recently, reminding me in some ways of Kate Winslet) as the young Margaret Roberts, and now we've had Lindsay Duncan in Margaret, an account of the Caesar-like conspiracies that led to her downfall on 22nd November 1990.

I was fearing a Tory-biased sympathetic portrayal, but this was offset by an extraordinary chalk-white appearance to Lindsay Duncan's face (her husband Denis is played by "Emperor Palpatine" himself, Ian McDiarmid!) and the halls of No. 10 Downing Street as represented here have never looked so cold and foreboding.

In amidst all this, I also saw Ian Amos's production of Three Tall Women at the Headgate Theatre, Edward Albee's autobiographical 1994 account of the troubled relationship with his (adoptive) mother, as played here by the ever reliable Sara Green. The first act follows a relatively conventional path, with the 91-year old character's Alzheimers, but in the second act, the three main actresses (SG, Maggie Brush and Charlotte Cocks) all become various stages of this woman's life - together with a very neat stage trick of having two "Sara Greens" on stage - with the younger version dressed as an elegant, attractive 1930s girl, intermingling with her later self in the 1960s and 1990s respectively.

The three actresses are very deliberately contrasting in style, and all perform well. At various points in the play the youngest one says to the eldest one: "I will never become you."

I wonder if both Margaret Roberts in The Long Walk to Finchley and Lindsay Duncan's Margaret would both be inclined to say that to the real Baroness Thatcher.