‘The one thing it doesn’t have is actual sex’: the new Mary Whitehouse play that would have infuriated Mary Whitehouse

She was the morality crusader who became a figure of ridicule. Now Whitehouse is the subject of a new production starring Maxine Peake. We meet the gay feminist playwright who wrote it

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he morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse was a trigger warning long before the term was used. From the 1960s onwards she pursued the BBC over sex and swearing on television and brought private prosecutions against the publisher of Gay News and the director of Howard Brenton’s play, The Romans in Britain, for what she viewed respectively as blasphemy and gross indecency.

So, when Maxine Peake plays the Christian cultural vigilante in The Last Stand of Mrs Mary Whitehouse at the Nottingham Playhouse this week, will there be a warning about its content?

Caroline Bird, the play’s writer, laughs. “There is one on the website and it’s quite funny because it sounds like a play that Mary Whitehouse would really hate.” The dramatist finds it on her phone. “Here it is: ‘This show contains graphic sexual language, homophobia and references to suicide and death. Religious imagery is used in a way some may find offensive.’ Although the one thing the play doesn’t have in it is actual sex, so she would have approved of that.”