Margaret Thatcher is making a comeback, and as prime minister too: The Line of Beauty, Billy Elliot: The Musical, a recent BBC Radio 4 documentary on her effect on British comedy – and now, at the National Theatre, she is a recurrent figurehead in David Eldridge’s Market Boy. This play is set in the 1980s in Romford market, Essex (take it as a metaphor for the market she championed), and the more the market thrives, the more Our Maggie is invoked as an icon.

She is only peripheral. The play’s protagonist is the anonymous Boy (Danny Worters), who learns the market values from within, working on a shoe stall. He is like a Charles Dickens boy protagonist, naive and vulnerable in the sophisticated adult world.

Larger than life, the market swirls round him satirically, its characters all so much tougher, shrewder, more colourful than he. By the time the Thatcher economy has swerved from boom to crash, Boy has learnt all too many of the lessons of the Thatcherite market: he too has started to become hard, rapacious. It is just possible that, as the play ends, he will start to unlearn – as Britain did.

Market Boy is a real “show”: it runs with much of the zip and colour of a good musical and, amid the huge cast, there is a wealth of first-rate acting (Claire Rushbook, Sophie Stanton, Jonathan Cullen, John Marquez, Jade Williams as Boy’s Girl). Danny Worters is ideal as Boy, a wide-eyed, fresh- faced blank whose vivid, eager naivety, touching in itself, proves a perfect focal point for the play. I suppose the production makes vocal amplification necessary, but it is sometimes excessive.

The clunkiest element is the Thatcher parody – but the whole play is on the clunky side, with its formulaic tale of innocence corrupted in the big bad world. It leaves us in no doubt that the values of the bizarre Maggie are false, but more doubt would make for better drama. ★★★☆☆

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