11 September 2025
To my father, an Anglican lay preacher, TV clean up campaigner Mrs Mary Whitehouse was the nearest thing to a living saint that our country has ever produced. To me, as a closeted teenager in the 1970s, she was evil incarnate, a bigoted campaigner who appeared to be completely obsessed with homosexuality and gay sex and attacked my tribe at every opportunity.
From the 1960s and throughout the next 40 years, Mary Whitehouse as the head of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, became shorthand for anti-liberal prudery and censorship in the UK. She gave up to 300 lectures a year, launched many campaigns against TV programmes such as Alf Garnett, video nasties, and even prosecuted the depiction of a homosexual rape on stage at the National Theatre in The Romans in Britain. Some of her targets were frivolous in the extreme and she became the letter writing scourge of both the BBC and Channel 4.
But this new play, by poet and playwright Caroline Bird, a two-hander with Maxine Peake playing Mrs Whitehouse and Samuel Barnett everybody else, both in and out of drag!, focus solely on her battle with the gays in particular the 1976 court case when she sued the editor of Gay News and his publication for blasphemous libel over an erotic poem detailing the desires of a Roman soldier with the body of the crucified Christ. A more apt title would have been Mrs. Mary Whitehouse vs the Gays.
As a 17-year-old cub reporter on the News & Star in Carlisle I interviewed Mrs. Mary Whitehouse. She was everything I could have wished for – truculent, 100% fixed in her opinions and outrageously outspoken. In fact, she gave me so many great anti-gay quotes that I filed a story for Gay News and earned a handsome cheque for £25, more than my entire weekly wage! It was my first by-lined story in a national newspaper and I was thrilled to bits, especially as my story was very negative about my bête noire.
But it turns out that the moral scars from that period run deep in my psyche and last night I found myself strangely unmoved – annoyed even – while much of the audience roared with laughter at some of her more bizarre pronouncements and actions and hissed panto-style at the arrival of Mrs Thatcher (one of Barnett’s better female creations). That scene was one of the play’s best – Mrs Whitehouse mistakenly believing that the two women are fellow travellers in her great moral crusade, but Thatcher casually dismissing her pleading to ban the sale of sex toys after being presented with a Tupperware of dildos “Do you know what a butt plug is, Prime Minister?” with the comment that the private sex shops are enterprising small businesses and should be supported. And she spurns her help out of hand with Section 28 “school children are putting condoms on bananas!”with a brusque “we have that taken care of”.
Bird’s play struggles in tone throughout, frequently veering too much towards the broad comedic. And vocally Peake fails to capture the authentic Mrs Whitehouse – she is chanelling Victoria Woods’ Kitty from Cheadle right down to the down turned mouth and pursed lips, a look also favoured by Barrie Humphries as Dame Edna Everage. Patricia Routledge really should sue. Whitehouse in real life was vocally more aggressive with a clipped delivery and a face that was quick to flash to anger and disapproval. Peake, looks just too fluffy and kind. She fares better playing the younger Whitehouse – stage hands dressing her and switching wigs centre stage, although playing her mother proves a drag too far for Mr Barnett.
Also it’s a shame that almost all the gay men featured are so weak or insipid characters- the vocally militant are only heard hectoring her in her garden at home.
I don’t know quite what I was expecting from The Last Stand of Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, but cute and fluffy was not on my bingo card. A curate’s egg of a production.
