The morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse was a trigger warning long before the term was used. From the 1960s onwards she pursued the BBC over sex and swearing on television and brought private prosecutions against the publisher of Gay News and the director of Howard Brenton’s play, The Romans in Britain, for what she viewed respectively as blasphemy and gross indecency.
So, when Maxine Peake plays the Christian cultural vigilante in The Last Stand of Mrs Mary Whitehouse at the Nottingham Playhouse this week, will there be a warning about its content?
Caroline Bird, the play’s writer, laughs. “There is one on the website and it’s quite funny because it sounds like a play that Mary Whitehouse would really hate.” The dramatist finds it on her phone. “Here it is: ‘This show contains graphic sexual language, homophobia and references to suicide and death. Religious imagery is used in a way some may find offensive.’ Although the one thing the play doesn’t have in it is actual sex, so she would have approved of that.”
If the content advisory follows one modern theatrical trend, the play’s authorship goes against the increasing convention that subject matter should ideally match the playwright’s own experience.
“Mary Whitehouse wasn’t material I would naturally have been drawn to – being leftwing and gay, two things of which she didn’t approve,” admits Bird. Her previous biographical drama for Nottingham Playhouse, Red Ellen (2022), was much closer to her own politics and feminism in its depiction of the pioneering Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson.
The idea of writing about Whitehouse came from Peake and the play’s director, Sarah Frankcom. Bird admitted her doubts but “they told me to go away, do a bit of research and see if there was something I could get my teeth into. So I ordered all of Whitehouse’s books off eBay and, within the first few hours of reading, she’d talked about Aids as a ‘vindication’ of her views, ‘spiritual conversion’ for gay people and homosexuality being part of a Russian conspiracy to bring down the west. Oh, and the ‘homosexual lobby’ conspiring to destroy the family.”
Although, as a gay feminist, Bird’s engagement with Whitehouse was antagonistic, she knew instinctively that, for dramatic effectiveness, the play could not be purely a rebuke or refutation: “Like in a court case, you have to give each side equal time to speak, regardless of your personal views. But in a play you also have to empathise with either side.”
She feels that, on both X and the stage, “it has become quite controversial to empathise with someone who you vehemently disagree with personally. ‘How could you humanise this person? How could you empathise with this person?’ But to write a play or a character you have to imagine how they feel.” Her motto while she was writing it was a quote from the film director Jean Renoir: “The real hell of life is everyone has [their] reasons.”
Bird’s attempt to present Whitehouse’s reasons for believing what she did caused mild domestic tension: “I’d be sitting here all day and my wife would come in in the evening and find me looking haunted and she’d say: ‘Have you been writing some convincing homophobia again?’ And I’d say: ‘Yeah.’ Because it felt important to show how persuasive she was.”
The writer rejects the idea that Whitehouse was simply of her time (born before the first world war) and tribe (Christian): “This is not the homophobia of my grandmother, who was Christian and called all my partners ‘flatmates’. This was a woman with a huge platform and agenda for 25 years.”
Whitehouse has often been treated as an essentially comic figure. Barry Humphries fed elements of her (spectacular glasses, an insistence on “housewife” values) into Dame Edna Everage and the campaigner’s Spitting Image puppet was more silly than sinister. Rob Newman and David Baddiel deliberately riled the clean-up-TV evangelist with the title of their show The Mary Whitehouse Experience that ran on the BBC in the early 1990s.
But, says Bird, “reading her books, I thought: ‘This woman is not at all the joke that some have presented her as.’ Even after her death, we have underestimated her. And that was another part of her personality: she knew she was underestimated and was frustrated by that on an intellectual level. But it was also part of her armoury: ‘Me, hateful? A grandmother who collects pebbles. I’m not coming for your free speech or to ban anything.’ It was also an excellent cover: the idea that she was just an ordinary person. She was anything but ordinary.’”
Through the numerous books and interviews plus the lifelong diaries archived in Oxford’s Bodleian library (“They’re written in these tiny hieroglyphics. I had to zoom in on my phone for hours and hours.”), Bird tried to isolate the experiences that created Whitehouse’s beliefs.
“She fell in love with a married man at a time when her parents’ marriage broke down – something she never wrote about. At the same time she joined what many have seen as a cult and was at least cult-adjacent: The Oxford Group, which later became the Moral Re-Armament movement.”
As her diaries reveal, throughout her life Whitehouse followed “Quiet Time”, a moral audit that her spiritual gurus promoted, in which someone writes down their thoughts and measures them against a series of divine criteria: is this absolutely honest? Is this absolutely selfless? Is this absolutely loving?
“So you basically spend each morning indoctrinating yourself,” says Bird. “Mary used to complain about the media and entertainment brainwashing people, but, if anyone was brainwashed, it was her. I think, having deprogrammed herself from loving a married man, it led her to believe that gay people could sort themselves out in the same way. And that helped me to understand her psychology.”
Bird was a student on a course taught by the playwright Simon Stephens: “He said you have to know things about characters that they don’t know about themselves. Which is hard enough with fictional people but having to get to that place with a real person is exceptionally tough. You have to do as much research as you can and then start making emotional decisions about what could be underneath what. It feels risky and historically impertinent but it’s the only way of making someone feel alive.”
On the Stephens rule, the things Whitehouse didn’t know (or acknowledge) about herself perhaps included the possibility of that adulterous love affair, the loss of twin babies and her parents’ divorce.
The play is a two-hander in which the 15 characters – including Whitehouse’s mother, Margaret Thatcher, a Roman centurion and Jesus Christ, the last two featuring in the poem that led to the prosecution of Gay News – who interact with Peake’s Whitehouse are all played by Samuel Barnett. But, while Barnett’s quick changes and cross-dressing are comedic devices, Bird stresses that: “It’s advertised as a comedy and I hope it is funny but it’s not a satire or send-up of Whitehouse; it’s trying to get close to the real person.”
Whitehouse was instrumental in passing the Protection of Children Act 1978, making child abuse images illegal, and also campaigned against what were then called “video nasties”, a strain of violent entertainment that digital technology has vastly popularised. Because those concerns seem prescient – and overlap with feminist and liberal thought – they have led to a revisionist view that Whitehouse has been proved “right” about important matters.
Bird understands this argument but demurs: “I have a slightly different take on it. We tend to think that, if we align with someone’s fears, we agree with them. But that’s only half the story; you have to look at what their solutions are. Of course we can align with her fears about the effects of unregulated content on young people. But her solution to that was sex education that only teaches chastity before marriage and fidelity within it. She was anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-divorce, anti-feminist. She wanted a very traditional Christian state. So before we say ‘she was right’, we have to look at the whole picture. She was on the money with some of the fears we all share but the Mary Whitehouse solution was dangerous. I understand why some people want to cherrypick her views but she represented a whole ideology. It’s probably because I’m gay but when people tweet things such as: ‘Where’s Mary Whitehouse when you need her?’, there’s a bit of a shiver.”
A key question in biographical fiction is the degree of invention the writer permits. Bird has created some scenes and characters to examine aspects of the story but gives a clear example of where she draws the line. One of Barnett’s cameos is John Smyth, Whitehouse’s barrister in the Gay News trial, who was later accused of sadistic beatings at Christian camps; failure to deal adequately with these allegations contributed to the resignation of Justin Welby as the archbishop of Canterbury. Many in the audience will bring knowledge of Smyth’s reputed behaviour to the play, but he isn’t exposed within it?
“No. The play is basically from Whitehouse’s perspective and she didn’t know about Smyth. If I thought for a second that she knew, I’d have included it. But she didn’t and so fictionalising her knowing would have been a step too far for me.”
Smyth, though, interests her as one of several examples of how some abusers use piety and charity as a cover: “Jimmy Savile made sure he was very close and aligned to Whitehouse. One of her fatal flaws was that she saw abusers everywhere unless they were on her side.”
Despite being a theatre play, Bird leaves out Whitehouse’s main engagement with the stage; the failure in 1982 of her attempt to jail Michael Bogdanov for directing an act of simulated sodomy in The Romans in Britain.
“One trial per play is quite enough,” says Bird. “Also, although it seems similar to the Gay News case, the issues that led her to The Romans in Britain are quite different, so I didn’t want to do the thing Whitehouse did, conflating things that, when you look at them, are actually quite different.”
Another Brenton play (with David Hare) – Pravda (1985), in which Anthony Hopkins was the monstrous newspaper baron, Lambert Le Roux – demonstrated the danger, long proved by Shakespeare’s Richard III, that a vivid character played by a great actor will take over the play and the audience.
“Yes. That will be interesting,” agrees Bird. “But I am OK with that because that is what Whitehouse did.”
Bird is aware that Whitehouse had an incredible way of getting inside people’s heads. “It does feel like a risk. A bit of me is terrified that someone who is slightly homophobic might come to the play and leave wholly homophobic! Because they’ve been so convinced by the speeches I’ve written for her. But you have to trust the audience.”
