The photo exhibition in the theatre’s foyer offers a glimpse into a different world. Riot police storm through the streets of decaying northern towns, pickets are bloodied from skirmishes outside the collieries and riot vans are turned over in the streets; women’s solidarity marches square up against armoured police lines, and socials and vigils are organised for the striking communities. Raw, fraught and gritty passion plays out across these desperate images. Ideological and material struggle coalesce in fixating tandem as our visual history of the miner’s strike takes us, from street level, through the harsh deprivations, violent confrontations and tender comradeship of this turbulent time. Maggie’s End is written by Trevor Wood and Ed Waugh to mark the 25th anniversary of the miner’s strike.

Enter Leon, Scene I. It’s 2010 and over 25 years on, our former activist-cum-lecturer begins the play by berating his disinterested students for their lack of idealism and political motivation. Firebrand turned cynic, this ex-Labour activist wallows in self-indulgent despair at their lack of critical engagement with the outside world, ending the scene in vitriolic condemnation of their apathy.

Enter Rosa, Leon’s daughter, and Callaghan, Scene II. Engaged in illicit fornication over the desk of the Home Secretary, the New Labour Minister and his Under Secretary are interrupted by a phone call informing them of Margaret Thatcher’s death, resulting in their simultaneous climax.

Enter Suzy, Scene III. Still politically active and fighting a local deportation case, Suzy comes unstuck in the face of Leon’s intransigent unwillingness to engage with the world outside the pub. His mother, former socialist and ILP founder, has just passed away, and Leon seems primarily concerned with consoling himself with drink in anticipation of her funeral.

Scene VI, and we are treated to the post-coital conversation between Callaghan and Rosa, where the Home Secretary expresses how disappointed the PM will be on hearing the news of Thatcher’s death. Rosa expresses her disgust at the memory of the Iron Lady, but accepts the political importance of maintaining deference in recollection of her achievements, recognising also that her promotion within the party’s ranks has been based upon her willingness to cooperate in such political compromises.

Scene V. Rosa, Suzy and Leon meet at the service, where the political tension between Suzy and Rosa boils over when Rosa places her Labour Rosette on the coffin. Enter uncle Arthur, the kindly but senile relic of Leon’s younger days – confused both as to the nature of the occasion (a wedding?) and also as to Leon’s identity.

The characters have thus been introduced, the stage set. The three conflicting forces through which the rest of the performance will oscillate have taken form. The explosive conflagration between Rosa’s corrupted pragmatism and Suzy’s untrammelled radicalism provide themselves as diametrical opposites, and Leon’s non-committal grumblings - though never threatening to take the side of his daughter’s careerist opportunism - threaten to allow her success through sheer lack of resistance. Where once there was optimism, there is now disillusionment. Where once there was loyalty, there now is betrayal. Taken as such in abstract form, the play is a well-intended assault on political demoralisation, hoping to inspire a sense of agency in its audience as proposals for Thatcher’s state funeral spark a public outcry and the potential rebirth of radicalism in society.

However the play’s blatant agenda as an agitprop piece for the ‘Reclaim Labour’ movement lead it into trouble as soon the central issue of Thatcher’s funeral begins to take shape. For socialists whose conception of political activity is intrinsically linked to reformist Labour ideology, the death of ‘Maggie’ seems to be both a fitting and necessary point of departure from contemporary political isolation. Jokes about the Party and Union bureaucracy, the use of Emergency Branch Meetings to impede (rather than aid) activity, and the complicity of the upper-end of the party hierarchy in anti-labour machinations drew appreciative snorts and grunts from the assorted Labour groupings in the audience at my showing; revealing the name of the Home Secretary’s ‘counter-terror’ programme in the run-up to anti-funeral protests as ‘operation icepick’ also drew some cynical murmurs of amusement.

But there is no doubt these references to long-gone political battles will fly miles above the heads of a younger audience, whose memories of Thatcher will be either distant or even non-existent, and for whom progressive working-class politics will never have been associated with the Labour Party. Maggie’s End doesn’t seek to create a modern basis for class politics, but rather, revive the Old through the resurrection of Thatcher’s memory in light of her demise. For writers Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood, creating a movement based upon people’s concerns today is of no relevance when to all extents and purposes, their ideas of socialism are still mired in the harkened days of the 1970s. It is a testament to the weakness of the current left that almost 20 years after her departure from office, Thatcher is still viewed as the primary obstacle to the achievement of their goals – on which they cannot operate without her removal.

As such, the play struggles through the first act with more than a faint whiff of sado-masochistic Old Left self-indulgence, spared only by some excellent performances and a sophisticated, if overly sinister, portrayal of Realpolitik in Whitehall. But its weaknesses taken into account, the authors find their feet in act two and from here the play finds its direction. With the aid of more fundamental political polemics and the natural course of plot development, the underlying themes of political activity, empowerment and political principle begin to disassemble an initial sense of impotent anger. The nature of the state apparatus begins to reveal itself more clearly as spurious ‘anti-terror’ legislation is used to monitor and obstruct activists organising in opposition to Thatcher’s funeral march. Rosa’s complicity in the active monitoring of her father and stepmother, despite her ideals, rips away any shred of credibility she may have achieved through her previously convincing defences of New Labour ‘realism’. In convincing the audience of the importance of their own activity in affecting political change, this play succeeds, despite the backward-looking focus of its topic.

The legacy of Thatcher understandably retains a great personal significance for the fractured remnants of the left today; enough so that as a student of 19, I can still feel the reverberations of her victory over the left’s old established forces, of class organisation and association, and any immediate sense of political direction. Lost battles on barricades, picket-lines and ballot boxes, followed by crushing defeat and two decades of humiliation, leave an understandably bitter aftertaste for any who ended up on the wrong side of Maggie’s truncheons through the ideological ascension of neoliberalism in the 80s.

But the left lost for a reason; because it was outdated, corrupt and stagnant - and Thatcher was merely the personification of fundamental changes occurring globally, not the cause. Whilst I wouldn’t be one to criticise the former miners of decimated pit villages for glorying in the death of the woman most associated with their destruction, there does come a point at which we have to move on. ‘Maggie’s End’, I fear, steps over that mark. Looking to revive the ideas of the left is an admirable ambition, but milling around in the crowd of 50+ shop-stewards and union bureaucrats, gazing at the photo exhibition almost fetishising the defeat, you realise that this simply cannot be the way.

Till 18th April.