Entertainment

The Iron Lady & the lively arts

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair figure in Peter Morgan's play.

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair figure in Peter Morgan’s play. (AP)

Helen Mirren (right) onstage as Queen Elizabeth in the play “The Audience,” headed for Broadway. (
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Margaret Thatcher was, like her good friend Ronald Reagan, a politician with theatrical flair. She gave one of the best performances I’ve ever seen — in the House of Commons right before she resigned as prime minister.

You can find it on YouTube, and anybody interested in how to command an audience’s attention should check it out. She jousts with her old Labor adversaries, brandishing her reading glasses like a sword.

When one suggests she become the governor of the Central Bank of Europe, the ardently Euro-skeptic Thatcher replies: “What a good idea! I hadn’t thought of that!”

After much applause and laughter, she raps the podium and says, “I’m enjoying this! I’m enjoying this!”

It’s great theater, and I know Meryl Streep watched it over and over as she prepared her Oscar-winning performance in “The Iron Lady.”

Thatcher, who died this week at 87, inspired many plays about her and her brand of conservatism — Thatcherism. Almost all are negative. She was loathed by artists in England because she cut back subsidies for the arts. At a cocktail party this week in New York, an official from the Royal Shakespeare Company likened her to “that tyrant, Julius Caesar.”

She returned their contempt, often roasting Peter Hall, then the head of the National Theatre, for his frequent complaints about lack of funding. She liked Andrew Lloyd Webber, however, and once called him one of Britain’s greatest exports.

This always prompted tut-tutting from the cultural elite. They believed Lloyd Webber’s musicals represented the “triumph of individualism and profitability,” as one critic wrote.

Oh, horrors! Musicals that are popular and make money? How gauche!

Caryl Churchill blasted the greediness of the Thatcher era in two plays from the ’80s — “Top Girls” and “Serious Money” — both of which were eventually produced in New York.

David Hare went after her as well in his 1988 play “The Secret Rapture.” Marion, the lead character, is an ambitious and ruthless conservative politician who has little use for society’s “takers.”

Thatcher also dominates “Billy Elliot” — in the form of a giant, menacing puppet. The striking miners sing “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher” and say they’re celebrating because “it’s one day closer to your death!”

(I once asked Elton John, who wrote the music, if he’d drop the song when Thatcher died. He said absolutely not. The show was performed in the West End on Monday with the song still in place.)

Thatcher popped up in several movies as well. My favorite is a campy bit from the 1981 Bond movie “For Your Eyes Only.” Thatcher, delightfully played by comedian Janet Brown, calls Bond on his phone wristwatch to thank him for saving the world. But Bond has gone skinny-dipping with a babe, leaving the watch next to a parrot. “Give us a kiss, give us a kiss,” the parrot says. Thatcher blushes: “Oh, well, really Mr. Bond!”

(It was a Bond movie. From the Roger Moore era. What can I say?)

Now Thatcher’s appearing in a play in the West End that’s slated to come to Broadway in the fall. Haydn Gwynne plays her in “The Audience,” which stars Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth. Peter Morgan’s play is about the Queen’s relationships with all the Prime Ministers who have served during her reign. In a scene crackling with tension, Thatcher bursts into the Queen’s private office raging about leaks from the Palace criticizing her policies. It’s clear that neither woman has much use for the other.

Potential investors in the Broadway production are concerned that the play might be too English. Some of the prime ministers — Harold Wilson, James Callaghan — won’t mean much to American audiences. Nor will ancient crises like Suez or the Winter of Discontent, when much of Britain was on strike.

But I ran into Stephen Daldry, who directed the play, at “Lucky Guy” last week and he said he and Morgan are going to rework “The Audience” for New York.

They will probably add a scene between the Queen and Tony Blair. (Morgan didn’t write one because he wanted to avoid comparisons to his Oscar-winning movie “The Queen,” in which Blair figures prominently.) They’ll likely discuss the war in Iraq. And there will, of course, be more of Churchill and Thatcher — two leaders of interest to New Yorkers.

The producers of “The Audience” are trying to work out the finances for Broadway. The problem, I’m told, is that Mirren doesn’t want to commit to more than 12 weeks (the standard star commitment these days). But the play has a large cast — 15 — so making the numbers work will be difficult. Mirren is being pressured, ever so gently, to give the producers a few more weeks.

As for padding the Thatcher scene, perhaps Morgan could explore her hostility to the arts, which wasn’t shared by the royal family.

But it must be remembered that though she thought the arts should stand on their own, she wasn’t entirely ignorant of the theater. At the 1981 Conservative Party conference, she was under pressure to reverse her economic policies, which caused a spike in unemployment.

“To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the ‘U-turn,’ I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!” she said.

It was a sly reference to “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” a 1948 verse drama by Christopher Fry.

And it became one of her signature lines.