Our Friends in the North Returns to Newcastle Stage in Thatcher-Era Play

Peter Flannery's four north-eastern dreamers have returned to the Newcastle stage in a new play condensing the Thatcher years of Our Friends in the North into a single 1979-85 arc. The production, Our Friends in the North: The Thatcher Years, runs at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle — the city where the original stage version toured after its 1982 premiere.

The characters have now logged more than 24 hours of drama across three formats. That is a full day of performance time for lawyer-councillor Mary, drifting philanderer Tosker, photo-journalist Nicky and petty criminal Geordie, the quartet Flannery created for the Royal Shakespeare Company more than four decades ago.

How did the saga reach this point?

The 1982 RSC world premiere ran almost four hours. The award-winning 1996 BBC Two television version ran 10 hours. The 2022 Radio 4 adaptation matched that 10-hour length. Flannery has now compressed the story again, this time into a play focused on the decade's political rupture.

Each format has used saga drama's signature device: testing fictional characters against landmark real events. The first stage version began in 1964, with Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson promising a new Britain, and ended in 1979, as Margaret Thatcher's victory heralded what the Guardian review calls a rightwing transformation.

What does the new play cover?

Flannery has tracked back rather than forward. The television version took the characters to 1995, on the brink of Tony Blair. The radio version reached 2020, encountering Boris Johnson and Covid. Instead of extending the timeline, the new play adapts the sixth and seventh episodes of the TV series — Thatcher in, miners out.

The review notes it would be intriguing to know whether the idealism of these now triple-locked pensioner characters might burn again under Burnham, but Flannery has chosen retrospection over extension.

The four actors have appeared in epic BBC dramas since their RSC debut, the review observes, and now return — in its phrase — as "old pals back on the toon," with the TV series, in the review's word, "squished" into theatrical form.

Why Newcastle matters here

Newcastle is not a neutral venue for this material. The first stage version toured there, and the story's characters are north-easterners shaped by the region's postwar fortunes. Bringing the Thatcher-era chapters — the miners' strike among them — to a Tyneside stage grounds the saga in the geography it depicts.

Flannery's choice of 1979-85 returns the work to the period when its political stakes were sharpest, and the Theatre Royal run will show whether an 80s-focused two-episode adaptation can carry the weight the longer versions bore.