Brutal and brilliant portrait of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford

The Last Days of Liz Truss? is a one-woman show about the brief interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. We first meet the future prime minister at a nursery school in Paisley where she orders the teachers to call her Elizabeth and not to use her first name, Mary. This establishes her combative, self-righteous nature and her utter dislike of authority.

Truss is like the smell of gas indoors. Even a tiny amount is too much

She left Oxford with a PPE degree and became a political activist while setting her sights firmly on parliament. (By researching the CVs of every sitting member, she had discovered that one in 30 of them held a degree in PPE from Oxford.) She was on her way. After a short flirtation with the Lib Dems, she found her true calling in the Tory party where she met the MP, Mark Field. ‘He mentored me,’ she says euphemistically. They had an affair which led to the collapse of Field’s marriage. But the canny Truss kept her own relationship intact.

She wrote a political manifesto, Britannia Unchained, which outlined her vision of a soaraway economy with low taxes and minimal state interference. Emma Wilkinson Wright reads from this book and delivers a convincing portrait of Truss’s stiff, impersonal character and her clotted, off-beat rhetorical manner.

The former prime minister is like the cleverest girl in school, who is also the most irritating. You want to admire her but you just can’t. The script shows little interest in Truss’s family life and overlooks her rumoured affair with her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng (which she has denied), but he gets to the heart of her political downfall.

In 2017, Truss was appointed chief secretary to the Treasury, where the top mandarins were openly scornful of her abilities. She felt that she’d been told to ‘stand in the corner’.