Trigger warnings automatically apply as Damian Barr adapts his own childhood memoir for this new National Theatre Of Scotland production. Not just for Barr’s painful account of abuse by a family member, but also for reviving Margaret Thatcher, played with uncomfortable realism by a game Beth Marshall. She’s one of an array of 80s icons evoked when a grown-up Barr (Gary Lamont) attempts to capture his own teenage development in prose. That book (published to acclaim in 2013) inspires this theatrical phantasmagoria with contemporary music (Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ several times) and caustic nostalgia, as he acts out scenes from soap opera Dynasty in Carfin Grotto and likens the Tories to those rat-swallowing aliens seen in tacky sci-fi drama V.

Co-written with James Ley, Maggie & Me opens with Barr sitting comfortably at a laptop behind his desk in Brighton circa 2008. Director Suba Das detonates his protective barriers of books and toys in a slick coup de theatre reminiscent of the NTS’ celebrated Black Watch. The IRA bombing of the Conservative Party conference in 1984 acts as a curtain raiser to a past hellscape that resembles Stephen King’s 'Salem’s Lot, a text borrowed by the author from his local library. Barr has regrets and remorse. As a kid, he tortured frogs by smashing them with tennis rackets, a vicious streak he excuses in the context of the cruel treatment he received such as being forced into abandoned wardrobes then toppled over, and having to deal with parental divorce. More specifically, there’s the threat posed by his mother’s violent partner, Logan, who turns innocent bath times into something to be feared.

Maggie & Me is very much a story of self-transformation in which Barr’s instinctive negativity to Thatcher, his father’s new girlfriend (‘Mary The Canary’) and other females is counterbalanced with his experience battling prejudice to assert himself as a gay man. Thatcher centres the personal and political from his child-like point of view with the young Barr begging her to rescue his father from a physically dangerous job at Ravenscraig steelworks. It’s a release that comes at a psychological cost to a precious, self-aware boy who labels himself somewhat negatively as ‘Damian “Free School Dinners Broken Home” Barr’.

With choreographed musical sequences, a substantial cast in multiple roles, and a large-scale quiz-game parody, Maggie & Me is an epic production with a deeply personal focus. Barr is clearly pleased with how well he turned out, but while the mixture of catharsis and self-congratulation feels earned, there’s no real attempt to translate or explain cultural references to anyone below 40.

Barr describes a girl at his school named Heather who is mocked for being a virgin while he was castigated for being gay; she admires his precocious reading (Muriel Spark, Tennessee Williams) and they fake a romantic partnership to defy the bullies. But Maggie & Me focuses so tightly on Barr that there’s no room for anyone else, and no empathy for any woman other than his mother; even the school bullies are somehow all female.

As an adult, Barr is shocked to find himself mirroring thoughts and phrases previously voiced by Thatcher, and the piece uses drama as a poultice to draw the poison of her influence from his system. Maggie & Me justifies its large-scale staging by dint of lively evocation of childhood experiences in beating the bullies, later finding Barr on the sticky dancefloor at Glasgow’s Bennets and becoming a big-wig journalist who can endlessly complain about tiresome editors demanding to see their copy. That sense of aggressive self-pity mixed with righteous, wounded anger at the damaging process of growing up in the 80s connects Maggie & Me to the psychodrama of recent film All Of Us Strangers, with unresolved parental issues coming back to haunt a protagonist in quasi-supernatural trappings. Seeing Thatcher as anything other than an outright hate figure may upset some audiences, but Barr’s articulate play reflects how the Tory treatment of AIDS as a bogeyman created an oppressive, corrosive climate. That’s an accurate, evocative message that should strike home with anyone from his generation who fought to find their inner fabulous during the Tory leader’s outwardly horrendous reign.
Maggie & Me, Dundee Rep, until Saturday 1 June; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Wednesday 12–Saturday 15 June; reviewed at Tron Theatre, Glasgow; Damian Barr is in conversation with Chitra Ramaswamy, National Library Of Scotland, Edinburgh, Thursday 6 June.