THE LAST DAYS OF LIZ TRUSS?

The Other Palace

★★★

“An entertaining and occasionally sharp piece of political theatre”

A play about Liz Truss arrives with an odd sense of temporal dislocation. Chronologically, her premiership only ended little more than three years ago, yet the relentless chaos that has filled the intervening period makes it feel like ancient history. That feeling of distance is difficult to shake, and The Last Days of Liz Truss?, for all its energy and wit, doesn’t always persuade you that there is fertile ground to till.

Initially drenched in the red, white and blue lights of a Union Jack, a melodic saxophone sighing in the background, Truss sits centre stage: forlorn, yet defiant. Over the following near two-hour running time, writer Greg Wilkinson takes us on a largely chronological journey through her rise and fall, framed by her last morning at Number Ten. The premise promises an exploration, comic and tragic in equal measure, of the tensions between ambition and ability, between vision and political reality.

There is no shortage of sharp wordplay and knowing jokes. Early on, Wilkinson draws on Truss’s real name — she was born Mary Elizabeth — for a riff on divided loyalties: in Tudor England, you were either for Elizabeth or for Mary, never both. It is a line that delights in its own neatness, and the play has many others, such as a recurring callback to karaoke sessions with Thérèse Coffey that’s reliably mined for laughs. Yet for all the verbal dexterity, the script only occasionally gets beneath the surface of its subject. Glimpses of the person behind the politician emerge — most intimately, a childhood insistence on being Elizabeth rather than Mary — but they remain just that: glimpses.

The script vacillates between skewering and sympathy. The office of prime minister is not presented as a particularly dignified one, and Wilkinson leans into the idea that Truss was poorly advised. Yet this is balanced by the sheer Truss-ness of our protagonist: a character constitutionally oblivious, who assumes that any challenge is confirmation of her correctness, and who accepts no blame for anything — making for a compelling portrait, if not always a complete one.

Emma Wilkinson Wright is an excellent Truss, with Director Anthony Shrubsall working with her to find moments of vulnerability and humanity that go beyond what the script alone provides. That peculiar stiffness so familiar from television is rendered with impressive naturalism, and she captures the clipped declarations and curious combination of defiance and bafflement that defined Truss’s public persona, occasionally revealing something more human than television ever did. The set and costume design (Male Arcucci) is a thoughtful complement, the Swatch watch and Claire’s Accessories jewellery quietly doing the work of making Truss seem relatable — a woman of the people, or at least trying to be. Steve Nallon, as the voice of Margaret Thatcher (a skill honed during his years on Spitting Image) and others, provides effective voiceover support, though some recorded impressions lack energy, leaving the central performance with less to play off than it deserves.

As the production moves towards its conclusion, Truss pivots into something approaching Cassandra: a prophet dismissed, warning of a Britain diminished by its reluctance to grow. The lighting design (Tom Younger) is particularly effective here, the stage darkening and contracting as she speaks, the shrinking state rendered with quiet visual intelligence. The ending, however, strains credibility — Truss acquiring a near-supernatural prescience that had eluded her throughout, tipping the play away from character study and into prophetic monologue.

Truss is a fascinating political footnote, and this production is at its best when it leans into that strangeness. But it ultimately leaves you wondering whether, perhaps, a footnote is all she should be consigned to. An entertaining and occasionally sharp piece of political theatre, but one that feels more like a chronicle than a reckoning. The question mark in the The Last Days of Liz Truss? promises interrogation; the play itself rarely delivers it.

THE LAST DAYS OF LIZ TRUSS?

The Other Palace

Reviewed on 4th March 2026

by Daniel Outis

Photography by Tristram Kenton

THE LAST DAYS OF LIZ TRUSS

★★★½

“a warm celebration of two extraordinary people”

Nestled behind the ornate facades of Piccadilly is a charming secret, Jermyn Street Theatre. Designed as a studio space that’s easily accessible to the West End, with merely 70 seats, the theatre guarantees its audience is never more than four rows away from the action. It’s a fitting backdrop for Dear Liar, an intimate story which travels the forty-year correspondence between two towering theatrical egos, George Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell. Brought to life in Jerome Kilty’s epistolary play, Shaw and Campbell became friends, collaborators, and something more complex—the subjects of one of theatre history’s most celebrated letter exchanges.

There’s a certain geographical poetry to staging a play about Shaw (Alan Turkington) and Mrs Campbell (Rachel Pickup) just round the corner from where their work would have debuted. Kilty’s script dances through their correspondence—covering the opening of Pygmalion, the ebb and flow of devotion, the careful construction of self. As a piece, it revels in its meta-textuality: their letters to each other are performances in themselves, as intimate as they are curated. When they eventually debate and argue over the publishing of these letters, the layers multiply—private becomes public becomes theatrical becomes our interpretation of both.

Yet converting letters into dialogue brings inevitable clunkiness at moments. The language itself is often magnificent, but the epistolary format resists easy dramatisation. Kilty’s script does well to link the letters together into conversation where possible, but it soars highest when abandoning the letters entirely—imagining, for instance, Shaw following Mrs Campbell to the seaside, or their Pygmalion rehearsal together, a comic reversal of the famous play where instead the grand dame struggles deliciously to sound like a flower girl. Pickup seizes the moment, her faux attempts at cockney earning some of the night’s biggest laughs.

Pickup overall is strong as Mrs Pat, capturing both her vanity and her vulnerability, bringing warmth and imperious grace to a woman who knew her own worth. Turkington delivers a solid performance as Shaw, though at times he feels a touch too even-keeled for a man known for his firebrand polemic. There are glimpses of Shaw’s childish capriciousness and intellectual fire, particularly in his anger at a young soldier’s pointless death, but they never fully ignite.

Stella Powell-Jones’ direction ensures the piece never succumbs to static staging, finding visual interest throughout. She uses the space inventively, varying levels and sightlines to keep the two-hander dynamic. A particularly affecting moment sees Mrs Pat materialise behind a curtain as Shaw describes her first appearance in Hollywood, the staging rendering her almost ghost-like as he mythologises her legend.

Tom Paris’ design work across set and costume yields uneven results. His drapes section the playing area deftly, conjuring immediate worlds whilst sparse staging elements anchor the space. The costuming, however, stumbles in its attempt to blend modern and period. It succeeds for Mrs Pat, but Shaw is saddled with a graphic undershirt beneath his waistcoat that reads more high street than Shavian, drawing the eye for the wrong reasons. Chris McDonnell’s lighting offers more assured work, bathing the stage in soft pink warmth, though Harry Blake’s typewriter sound design veers between effective and unnecessarily intrusive.

At its heart, Dear Liar offers comfort theatre at its best—a warm celebration of two extraordinary people, presenting a mosaic of their lives that illuminates the humans behind the legends. It’s truly a theatre lover’s play, holding a bittersweet irony at its centre: Mrs Patrick Campbell’s performances were ephemeral, lost to time as all theatre must be, yet through these letters her words endure alongside Shaw’s. Productions like this preserve what the stage could not—her voice, her wit, her humanity—even as she protests to Shaw her inability to match his way with words. It may not break new ground, but it delivers wit, tenderness, and theatrical charm in abundance.

Tag Archives: Daniel Outis

THE LAST DAYS OF LIZ TRUSS?

★★★

The Other Palace

THE LAST DAYS OF LIZ TRUSS?

The Other Palace

★★★

“An entertaining and occasionally sharp piece of political theatre”