LONDONâ€"Margaret Thatcher didn’t have much time for one of Britain’s defining qualities - its abundance of theater - but theater people certainly had plenty of time for her. If only antagonistically.
That’s to say that while the former prime minister, who died Monday, famously incurred the wrath of the likes of Peter Hall, the former artistic director of the National Theatre and a fierce proponent of the very principles of state subsidy for the arts that Mrs. Thatcher was against, her personality - and politics - were catnip to dramatists then and even now.
When I first moved to London from New York in the 1980s, critiques of Thatcherism seemed to be de rigueur for playwrights who had almost nothing else in common. (Think David Hare and Alan Ayckbourn, for example.) And when her leadership came to an end, you could almost hear the sighs of relief, but tinged with something approaching disappointment: Who was the cultural community going to kick around in her stead
With that in mind, what follows is a crib sheet to five seminal British plays (one is a musical and another a joint entry) that would never have come to fruition without Mrs. Thatcher and her zeitgeist to act as a call to dramatic arms.
And now that she is gone Britain’s only female prime minister walks among us onstage still: Two of these works are very much still running.
1. “Top Girls†(1982)/â€Serious Money†(1987)
Two plays from one (supreme) playwright, Caryl Churchill, a Leftist mainstay of the Royal Court Theatre, where both these works were first seen, five years apart. “Top Girls†doesn’t directly concern the political “top girl†- no, make that “iron lady†- of the time, but its moral compass owes everything to a climate that saw Mrs. Thatcher come to power without necessarily easing the way for women to follow her. Its final word, “frightening,†tells playgoers all they need know about the author’s point of view.
“Serious Money,†in turn, takes a savage moral scalpel to the galloping financial excesses of the age as made possible, the play makes plain, by Thatcher-era economics. Intended as a satire, Max Stafford-Clark’s original production was lapped up by the very constituency that the writing lampooned. There were reports at the time of patrons setting 20 pound notes alight at the intermission in glee. Why Well, because they could.
2. “A Small Family Business†(1987)
It’s hard to imagine a less placard-waving dramatist than Alan Ayckbourn, whose extraordinary output (more plays, at 77, than he is years old, 74 this week), tends to focus on suburban English families in psychic disarray. But the author, who directed the National Theatre debut of this large-scale 1987 play, sends Thatcherism coursing through his depiction here of a community seen to be ceaselessly on the make. Bitterly comic and as often as not just bitter, the play sustains interest today as an attack on a society in merciless thrall to materialism; Ayckbourn being Ayckbourn, it’s also fiendishly entertaining, as well.
3. “The Secret Rapture†(1988)
David Hare’s play transferred (unsuccessfully) to Broadway, was filmed, and has been revived on the West End, but it is most fondly remembered from its dazzling National Theatre premiere in 1988, starring Penelope Wilton, Clare Higgins, and the late Jill Baker and directed by Howard Davies (who later went on to do the film).
Never shy about stating his longstanding antipathy to Thatcher, Mr. Hare here found a stand-in of sorts for the country’s leader in the character of the fearlessly pragmatic Marion French, a politician in the ascendant who is given to lines like, “God, how I hate all this human stuff.†Sound like anyone we knew
4. “Billy Elliot the Musical†(2005)
Placards actually do get waved in this British stage musical adaptation of the much-lauded Stephen Daldry/Lee Hall film, which sets the artistic yearnings of the young ballet dancer of the title against the backdrop of the miners’ strikes that seared Britain in the mid-1980s.
Thatcher, in turn, features in a second-act ensemble number written by Mr. Hall and the show’s composer, Elton John, that looks forward to each day as being that much nearer to the death of the union-busting politician who lost the miners their jobs. At Monday night’s performance of the ongoing West End production at the Victoria Palace Theatre, a vote was taken to see whether the audience would like the number on that night to be kept in or taken out.
By an overwhelming majority, they opted to keep the song, and the show, as is.
5. “The Audience†(2013)
Peter Morgan’s Broadway-bound play about Queen Elizabeth II’s weekly audiences with her various prime ministers across her six-decade reign saves the duologue with Thatcher for well into the second act. That might be because the creative team wanted to build to a climax - or maybe it’s because that encounter is in fact the weakest of a lineup of British leaders that, in theatrical terms at least, is stolen by Richard McCabe’s funny and wounding portrayal of the comparatively little-known Harold Wilson.
Mr. Morgan’s show, too, was performed unchanged on Monday, though rewrites are being mooted for next season’s Broadway run. The Thatcher stuff, in my view, is ripest for tweaking, even though, when it comes to closing the book on Thatcher herself, the narrative of her legacy is far from written out.
