The play received positive reviews.
The Times wrote: "Oberman has the time of her life chewing up the scenery in this frequently grotesque comedy drama...Gregory Evans has woven an atmosphere of poisonous paranoia, stocked with rabid right-wingers, sycophants and the occasional caring Conservative. Excellent fun."
Gillian Reynolds, for
The Daily Telegraph, observed that the play "avoided front-parlour-back-room realism and went instead for a series of aural sketches (Shirley shouting, Shirley not understanding, people avoiding Shirley, people telling Shirley she was wrong, Shirley invincibly convinced she was right), which fell together into a brutally comic, unexpectedly sad composite portrait." Of Oberman's performance, Reynolds wrote: "It's a thoughtful sketch of a woman in power, how she came to it, what she did with it, beautifully acted by Tracy-Ann Oberman." Paul Donovan, for
The Sunday Times, called the play "taut, vicious, gripping" and felt that the character of Porter emerged "as an immensely strong, charismatic woman surrounded by jellyfish." ==Stage adaptation==