Peggy For You – Hampstead Theatre, London

A review of Peggy For You, the last of Hampstead Theatre’s season of ‘originals’. This comedic portrait of real-life agent Peggy Ramsay is affectionate yet honest, with a top-notch performance by Tamsin Greig.

Alan Plater on Peggy Ramsay

Peggy Ramsay was a force to be reckoned with. Her life, ironically enough, sounds like a character in a play. She grew up partly on a South African ostrich farm, and married and divorced her university professor at a young age. She was in her 40s by the time she started up business as an agent for playwrights. Over more than two decades, she had 400+ writers on her books. Many of these were at the cutting edge of new trends in post-war theatre. And Peggy was right there, nurturing talent and encouraging good writing at the expense of all else (money, personal happiness, etc.).

Ramsay died in 1991, and Alan Plater, one of the 400+ talents she had nurtured, wrote a play based on a typical day in her life. It debuted right here at Hampstead Theatre in 1999. Like The Death of a Black Man and The Two Character Play, it thus forms part of the Original season, of plays which had their world premieres at Hampstead. Ramsay had exhorted Plater to “make sure [the play] is a pack of lies,” and that’s sort of what he did. He eschewed research, preferring to use memory to paint a portrait of this scatterbrained, witty, bullying, powerful woman.

There are several essays in the programme which support this view of Ramsay as a contradictory yet ultimately forceful personality. I like people like this, who are uninhibited in taking what they want and saying what they feel, which perhaps makes me the perfect audience member for Peggy For You. There’s no doubt some of the dialogue is a little dated, and the premise of a day of conversations about plays and playwriting a little navel gazing. But ultimately I found it rather charming, with enough of a serious look at what makes a person tough vs. heartless to keep it relevant in the years since it premiered.

Peggy For You

So as I outlined above, the premise of Peggy For You is a day in Peggy Ramsay’s life, in her upstairs office in Goodwin’s Court. Over the course of the day we meet her secretary Tessa (or is it Stephanie?), as well as three playwrights. It’s a bit like the three stages of man; there’s a young one who has just written his first play; one who is at the height of his career; and an older playwright who is feeling rather disillusioned. Peggy meets with them all, takes other phone calls, and laughingly ponders the question ‘What is a play?’, posed by young playwright Simon when he is told that his is not one.

The role of Peggy is an interesting one for an actor to get their teeth into. And Tamsin Greig seems to absolutely relish it. She brings out the contradictions in Peggy’s nature beautifully, while delivering all of the ‘scatty’ lines seemingly spontaneously. The way she holds our attention across the entire length of the play demonstrates how a charismatic personality like Peggy’s carries people along in its wake. There are mostly strong performances across the board (I particularly liked Josh Finan as ingenue Simon and Trevor Fox as glum Geordie playwright Henry). But this is Greig’s play and she knows it.

Richard Wilson’s direction is the other element which prevents Peggy For You from slipping into too much naval gazing. Wilson, a Hampstead veteran, has great control of the pacing. He keeps the action moving throughout, and doesn’t get too bogged down in the second half’s shift in tone. Rather, the audience must make their own minds up about the side of the line on which Ramsay’s personality ultimately falls.

Final Thoughts

I loved the set design by James Cotterill. Peggy’s upstairs office, with disorganised piles of papers and scripts everywhere, feels like somewhere you want to spend time. And framed posters on the walls, spotlighted by lighting designer Johanna Town during scene changes, remind us what all of these characters are ultimately there to do. For me this was actually one of the key takeaways from Peggy For You. I had never previously thought about the impact a playwright’s agent might have on the quality of their work. I am an amateur rather than an insider when it comes to the dramatic arts, so seeing how a smart agent can push her clients to do better (with sometimes dubious methods) was a bit of a lightbulb moment.

So maybe a slightly naval-gazing piece of theatre isn’t all bad. As Peggy Ramsay shows us, working in and around theatres can be as all-consuming as you want it to be. It’s something that inspires great passion, and sometimes great suffering. I enjoyed this little window into post-war British theatre and one of its enduring personalities.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

Peggy For You on until 29 January 2022