In this superbly staged entertainment, June Abbott's snappy direction and a cast whose sparkle matches the script carries the audience on a tide of laughter. The satire's directed mainly at the vagaries of TV news presentation, but darker issues surrounding attitudes to women also surface in this provacatively-titled play, a finalist of the 2007 King’s Cross Award for New Writing.

A centre-stage coffin represents the mythical demise, catalyzing individual and collective reaction: for news presenter Jonelle it’s a make-or-break career challenge; former Thatcher-hater Hoagy is so overwhelmed by grief he consults a psychiatrist; Michael Connolly begins walking from the North to London, ‘to spit on her grave’; awestruck funeral director Dudley’s only concern is that there are no glitches in the build-up to the big day.

‘Do I look sad enough?’ says presenter Jonelle, in a superbly controlled performance by Alex Topham Tyerman, just before she announces the death of ‘Baroness Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister’. Against a background of studio rivalries, outside broadcasters announce the growing numbers approaching the capital and distraught Hoagy’s dreams become ever more bizarrely sexual. Alan Freestone’s ‘everyman’ is precisely judged, as he progresses from exasperated confusion to literally naked panic. Meanwhile Dudley, played with excellent biscuit-dunking insouciance by John Elnaugh, reminiscences about the time he volunteered himself as executioner should the Iron Lady bring back hanging.

‘Do you notice’, says Hoagy to his silent therapist,( a tour de force of arched eye-brows and pursed lips from Pamela Hall) ‘that news used to come in ‘flashes’ but now it ‘breaks’?’ The random bundling of disparate events in a succession of crass headlines and the clichéd jolliness of outside reporters provoked delighted response from the full-house audience on the second night of the run.

The in-the-round staging at the Courtyard Theatre lends itself well to a play that constantly moves between locations, and the sound system performs well in the pre-news crescendos during the studio-manager's count down, (a thoroughly credible Russell Anthony), an increasingly anxious few moments as backstage tensions escalate. The intertwining strands intensify to denouement as the funeral day approaches. If the funeral parlour scenes seem slightly underwritten, perhaps this is not so surprising. Dudley’s opening complaint that people talk too much is a logical precursor to his closing line, ‘Let’s just have silence now’. It resonates beyond the immediate context to a plea for TV news which is less exploitive, of both its audience and its employees.