While the prime minister between 1979 and 1990 liked to invite identification with a previous war leader, the truth is that the one unarguable connection between Thatcher and Churchill lies not in British politics but in theatre. It was the election of Margaret Thatcher which led Caryl Churchill to write her 1982 drama Top Girls, an inventive reflection on right-wing feminism, which was revived in London this week, when it was deservedly acclaimed as a modern classic.
Top Girls is unusual among plays which endure - as opposed to hit-and-run satire - in being directly attributable to a single political administration. In fact while Thatcher disliked theatre, and presided over a reduction of state funding to it, she was almost as responsible for commissioning Top Girls as the Royal Court Theatre, which staged it, through the provocation of her ideology. So, if Churchill's drama is, in political terms, a Margaret Thatcher Production, the question is raised of which plays other administrations have to their names.
A distinction needs to be drawn between direct representations of the politicians themselves and pieces which breathe - or, more often, choke on - the cultural air they create. The satirical evenings Anyone For Denis? and A Short Sharp Shock could never have existed without Thatcher but were so closely allied with her that they inevitably left the stage when she did. Richard Nixon is the modern leader most frequently depicted on stage - because of a personality of Shakespearean scale and shade - but a more general record of his era exists largely tangentially in Vietnam plays.
And the question of why a play dates from a particular period is complicated. While some writers are inspired by headlines or anniversaries, others affect timelessness or deliberately revisit styles or subjects from the past. It's far more significant that Sir Anthony Eden was in Number 10 when John Osborne's Look Back In Anger was premiered than that Harold Wilson was premier when Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead made Tom Stoppard famous. The Osborne was part of a rebellion against an England-in-aspic which Eden typified; the Stoppard could have been written any time between 1955 (the date of Beckett's Waiting For Godot, which influenced it) and now, when updatings of Shakespeare are a Hollywood staple.
The lasting power of Top Girls is that Caryl Churchill took from the time of the writing a debate - over whether feminist principles could survive the exercise of power by women - which was topical but has also endured. Indeed, the drama is arguably more revelant now, when a female prime minister looks like a historical blip and the main parties have all been led by men for 12 years, than when high heels had clicked over the Number 10 steps for the first time. A political period consistently discouraging to theatre as a business and an art also inspired Churchill's next major play Serious Money - her 1987 piece about City greed - as well as David Edgar's Maydays (1983), Howard Brenton and David Hare's Pravda (1985) and Hare's The Secret Rapture (1987). The latter, like Top Girls, examines a powerful, rightwing woman. Although it would have given Mrs Thatcher bad dreams during her three hours nightly sleep to know it, she was virtually an unofficial national dramaturge, bringing almost as many new plays into existence as Kenneth Tynan.
The notoriously colourless administration of John Major was little reflected theatrically except for the dramatisation of the Scott inquiry: Only Half The Picture. Indeed, perhaps symbolically of the dent that Major failed to make, it was the man he beat in 1992 who inspired the three-hour epic at the Royal National Theatre: David Hare's The Absence Of War (1993), about the failures of a Kinnockian Labour leader. The five years to date of the Blair era have so far spawned mainly satires: Brenton's and Tariq Ali's Ugly Rumours and Alistair Beaton's Feelgood. This may be a mark of Blair's ideological lightness, as Thatcher had been in power for only three years when Top Girls appeared.
For the purposes of comparison, it's intriguing to see who was in the White House when two of the great American plays - Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman and The Crucible - emerged on Broadway. Salesman is a Truman play, Crucible an Eisenhower one. This shows the limitation of top-down drama criticism. In creating Willy Loman, Miller reflected a commercialism which transcended party politics while The Crucible uses the Salem witch-hunts as a metaphor for the anti-communist activities of Senator Joe McCarthy. This inspiration, though, is so disguised that Miller's play has come to stand for numerous other intolerances around the world.
So, if we were to hand out awards to politicians for their influence on theatre (perhaps the prizes might be called the Tonies) the title for best new play-maker would be shared between Lady Thatcher and Senator McCarthy. Though both regarded dramatists as dangerous lefties who ought to be starved of state funds, they were inadvertently responsible for remarkable plays. It's a dilemma for playwrights in the ballot booth. More naturally sympathetic to leaders who might pay for theatre, they might - history suggests - be better off with politicians who set out to make theatre pay.
