LONDON — If you’re going to crib from one of the greats, it helps to have great actors at your command. “Hansard,” at the National Theater through Nov. 25, is the debut play from the actor Simon Woods, perhaps best known for the TV series “Cranford.” But even as the writing makes plain a slavish debt to Edward Albee, this two-hander is kept aloft by a pair of performers, Lindsay Duncan and Alex Jennings, able to make its overfamiliar contours seem fresh.

The 85-minute play (no intermission) could as easily be titled “Who’s Afraid of Margaret Thatcher?” That’s because “Hansard,” centering on the jibes and ripostes of a married couple, specifically recalls Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — including its unseen if much discussed son — but set in the world of British politics in the 1980s.

One thing this husband and wife are bickering about is Section 28, a 1988 law that prohibited the local authorities from “promoting homosexuality.” (It was eventually repealed in 2003.) But Diana Hesketh (Ms. Duncan), an eloquent left-winger, finds much else about which to square off against her husband, Robin (Mr. Jennings), a Conservative member of Parliament whose background sounds an awful lot like that of the current prime minister, Boris Johnson. That affinity allows “Hansard” to elide past and present: A wisecrack about “European foxes” wreaking havoc on Diana’s adored garden winks at Brexit-era realpolitik.

There are jokes about Mrs. Thatcher going to the theater (an activity she was known to dislike) , as well as a remarkably tasteless jab at a onetime Conservative party grandee and his wife, who was paralyzed by an IRA bombing. But most of the play consists of the two actors, both Olivier Award winners, watchfully maneuvering across the wide expanse of Hildegard Bechtler’s airy yet arid set, quoting Shakespeare at each other or joining forces to make a mean-looking bloody mary. Diana, especially, appears to know her way around the drinks cabinet.