The Thousands

What better traditional holiday entertainment than a rollicking English pantomime? This political fairytale is seasonably hilarious, and ultra-conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, despite Meryl Streep’s uncanny verisimilitude, is as farcical as any cross-dressing panto dame. In 2008, the aged, demented ex-PM potters about, lost in her memories. She’s daring the audience to shout, “Your heyday is BEHIND YOU!!”

The dialogue is a scream. As Thatcher teaches her teenage daughter Carol (Olivia Colman) to drive, Carol struggles to overtake a cyclist and Thatcher bellows, “Move to the right! TO THE RIGHT!” Later, after Thatcher berates loyal deputy Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head) for daring to spell ‘poverty’ with only one T, she overhears a disgusted fellow Tory saying, “I wouldn’t speak to my gamekeeper that way.” Periodically, her now-deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent) pops up as a puckish, increasingly wacky hallucination.

Are such picaresque antics what director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan intended? Hopefully, because as a feminist underdog fable, it’s deplorably tasteless. Thatcher’s notorious career is glossed, casually spiced with archival footage of alarmingly savage police brutality, while Thatcher pontificates that she’s “done battle every single day of my life”. Retorts a brutalised Britain: oh no you haven’t!