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
