Hilary Mantel’s controversial story imagining the murder of Margaret Thatcher in the summer of 1983 is to be staged next year in Liverpool.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983 was published in the Guardian in 2014 and gave the title to Mantel’s collection of short stories that year. In the tale, a woman opens the front door of her flat in a “genteel corner” of Windsor expecting a plumber yet finds a gunman entering. He is intent on using her home’s vantage point to take aim at the then prime minister, who is having an eye operation at a nearby private hospital.

Billed as a psychological thriller, the adaptation is by Alexandra Wood and will be directed by John Young at the Everyman theatre in May. “This isn’t just a play for people who have an opinion or strong feeling towards Maggie Thatcher,” said Young. “It’s about class, about lives that collide, people trying to understand, asking questions, coming together and bridging that divide. I also think it’s a play about what happens when people feel they don’t have a voice, and how dangerous it is when they feel they don’t have anything to lose.”

Mantel’s story was inspired by her own sighting of Thatcher in the hospital’s grounds, on the titular date, from the author’s flat in Windsor. “Immediately your eye measures the distance,” she told the Guardian in 2014. “I thought, if I wasn’t me, if I was someone else, she’d be dead.”

In the year of the story’s publication, Mantel was made a dame and her Booker prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, were staged to great acclaim by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The next book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (2020), was co-adapted by Mantel and the actor Ben Miles, who played Cromwell, for an RSC production in 2021. “I now know that I should have been doing this all my life,” Mantel said of playwriting. The following year, she died aged 70 after suffering a stroke.

Despite recognising that Thatcher was “the very stuff of drama” it took 30 years for Mantel to write the story that was inspired by her glimpse of the prime minister. It was published a year after Thatcher’s death. “I just couldn’t see how to get [the characters of the gunman, whose cause is “Ireland. Only Ireland” and the woman who is the narrator] to work together,” she said. “They must examine their own myths and those of their communities. Each colludes for their own reasons.”

After its publication the story drew some criticism, including from Tory MPs, and there was a call for Mantel to be investigated by the police. The author dismissed the response, saying: “I think it would be unconscionable to say this is too dark, we can’t examine it. We can’t be running away from history. We have to face it head on, because the repercussions of Mrs Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation.”

In the play, said Young: “There are big themes about what Thatcher means to us now, and what she meant, and her relationship to a divided Britain. And of course, the relationship between Thatcher and Liverpool.” The sniper has what the narrator describes as a Liverpudlian accent. The story is set at a time of sustained industrial decline in the port city, two summers after the Toxteth riots, which led the prime minister to install Michael Heseltine as “Minister for Merseyside”.

Young continued: “One of the gorgeous things about the Everyman space is that it can do both intimacy and massiveness really well. I think that’s what this play does. You’re in a small flat with just two people, but the ideas and subjects they’re talking about are enormous. It’s about this flat, but it’s also about the world.”

Wood’s previous plays include an adaptation of Kate Summerscale’s novel The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, staged at the Watermill theatre in Newbury in 2023. Casting for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which runs from 2–23 May, has not yet been announced. The play is part of Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse’s new season, announced on Thursday, which includes Attachment by Julia Cranney, a drama developed alongside adoptive families from Merseyside.