LONDON: Days before Moira Buffini sat down to write her play about the secret relationship between the Queen and her only woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher died. “Suddenly I felt I was back in the 1980s, when politics was passionate,” the playwright recalls. “People were calling for the witch to be burned. Others were crying unfeigned tears of grief in the street.”

Her new play Handbagged was drafted in the ensuing three weeks, as Facebook e-vites to flashmob street parties celebrating the Iron Lady’s death juxtaposed with Thatcher loyalists trying to suck the oxygen of publicity from anyone who dared doubt she was Britain’s post-war saviour. As Britain opened old wounds, Buffini imagined what took place weekly at Buckingham Palace between 1979 and 1990, when the world’s most powerful women (Indira Gandhi excepted) met.

“One of the things I wanted to do was express the passion of politics in the 1980s, when you couldn’t be disengaged,” says Buffini, a schoolgirl when Thatcher was elected in 1979 and later a anti-nuclear weapons CND supporter Thatcher would have despised. “I was too young to be at Greenham Common,” she adds with a little regret. “What happened in April was just a hint of what that decade was like. There’s been nothing like her since.” Or before? “That’s right. She ended consensus politics. What was it she said about Old Testament prophets?” (What Thatcher said was: “The Old Testament prophets did not say, ‘Brothers, I want a consensus.’ They said, ‘This is my faith. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it, too, then come with me.’”)Buffini goes on: “No other politician could speak that way.” And no politician would dare sound as risibly queenly as Thatcher did in front of the cameras on 3 March 1989, when she deployed the first person plural: “We have become a grandmother.”

The Queen was a role model for Thatcher, says Buffini. “The hats, the gloves, the coats were all her aspiring to look like the woman she admired. She aspired to be regal.” Then advisers advised junking that wardrobe, but the regal aspirations remained. Hence some of the dramatic tension in those weekly meetings, where the leader of Her Majesty’s government kept Her Majesty abreast of developments: race riots, Falklands war, miners’ strike, the poll tax, mass unemployment-with no warmth or intimacy.

The play contains this exchange: “There was no intimacy with her,” says Q of T. “No letting down of hair.” T explains why. “You are my Queen,” says T to Q. “I am your subject. The first move towards a close relationship could not have come from me.”

In this, Thatcher was an oddity, says Buffini. “Edward Heath said you knew you were talking to someone you could say anything to, and that you could get things off your chest without fear of them appearing in the press. I’m not sure Thatcher felt that way. In some strange way, she wanted to protect the Queen. I think the Queen found that patronising.” The Queen could have been Thatcher’s confidante, but the latter didn’t roll that way. The play could have been called ‘Ten Years of Awkwardness’, though Handbagged is catchier.

But surely your play is speculation? The meetings between monarch and PM are unminuted. “It’s all surmise,” concedes Buffini. “There are amazingly few — two or three — references to the Queen in Thatcher’s voluminous memoirs.” Almost as if she couldn’t dare express any resentment she felt to the one Briton more powerful than her? “I don’t know. I think there was a great mutual respect.” And the Queen has not expressed her views about her only female premier — unless we are to believe she was behind the 1986 Sunday Times article in which her press secretary reportedly briefed journalists about Buckingham Palace’s annoyance at Thatcher’s anti-sanctions stance against apartheid South Africa.

Handbagged has two Thatchers and two queens. T is the older Thatcher, Mags the younger; Q is the older Queen, Liz her younger self. After getting the commission to write the play, Buffini learned that Peter Morgan’s The Audience was to be staged in the West End, a play that imagines 60 years of the Queen’s weekly meetings with eight of her 12 prime ministers.

Buffini worried that Morgan had stolen her thunder, but now she hopes to do something more nuanced than The Audience, which the Guardian’s Michael Billington called a “series of revue sketches — a kind of 1956 and All That”. The title Handbagged may evoke a Punch & Judy or Celebrity Death Match vibe, but her aim is to free the Grantham One from satire. “It’s hard to think of her except as a Spitting Image puppet. And, although I admire Armando Iannucci, there’s got to be another way of dramatising politics, particularly when you’re writing about Thatcher.”

That hasn’t happened often. In Steven Berkoff’s 1986 satire Sink the Belgrano!, Thatcher became Maggot Scratcher. In David Eldridge’s 2006 Market Boy for the National, she leapt from behind a market stall with lobster claws saying: “I’m the cheapest lobster in this free market! Eat me! Grab me! Consume me! I’m a cold-blooded creature with no brain!” And in Lee Hall’s long-running musical Billy Elliot, the carol at the miners’ club — written by Elton John — is called Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher. It goes: “We all celebrate today,/ Cause it’s one day closer to your death.”

Perhaps it is time theatre took Thatcher seriously. But Buffini found that liberating Thatcher from latex and presenting her as flesh and blood brought new problems. “The difficulty is that the very act of creating a character means you get under their skin and humanise them. You risk tipping the drama towards sympathising with her.”

Sympathy for Thatcher? That, arguably, is what Abi Morgan’s script for Phyllida Lloyd’s 2011 film The Iron Lady did, by framing the drama from the perspective of a powerless elderly woman, played by Meryl Streep, struggling with dementia in 2008 and looking back on her years as PM. “I think that film has many strengths, but yes, dementia elicits sympathy. And the minute you have sympathy for a character, that clears away doubts.”

Handbagged takes a different approach — by juxtaposing two women with so much and yet so little in common. So much: born only five months apart, both idealised their father, neither an unproblematic feminist icon. And so little: “One believed there was no such thing as society,” goes the blurb for the play. “The other had vowed to serve it.” Buffini clinches that point: “When the Queen expressed sympathy for the miners’ wives, Thatcher suggested that the miners’ wives should tell their men to be sensible.” Thatcher loathed what the Queen loved, Buffini adds. “When Thatcher went to Balmoral, she hated it — bagpipes, wellingtons, corgis. She couldn’t wear shoes. And yet it was there the Queen felt most at home.”

Buffini depicts the Queen as the more emotionally articulate of the two. When Lord Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA in 1979, Thatcher — only recently elected — didn’t call the Queen to pass on her condolences at the assassination of Prince Philip’s uncle; given the political ramifications, the head of state and the PM had to talk — but it was the grieving Queen who made the call. In 1984, the Queen called Thatcher after the Brighton bomb. “The Queen was visiting New York privately to see some horses. Her kind of good time. When she called, before she could say anything, Thatcher said, ‘Are you having a wonderful time?’”

But Buffini doesn’t go too far in depicting the Queen as emotionally incontinent. “Whatever we say must stay between these three walls,” says Q to T. “Nothing uncontrolled. No outpouring,” says T to Q. Then Q says: “Then we’d better have some tea. When one needs to control the pouring, tea can be most reassuring.” Both women were, after all, English and of a certain age.

By arrangement with the Guardian