Beaton looks back in anger

Alistair Beaton is one of the UK's leading satirists, whose credits range from Not The Nine O'Clock News to Spitting Image. In 2001, he also presented himself as a playwright with his sellout comedy Feelgood, a send-up of New Labour's cynical culture of spin.

Now Beaton is back with another equally biting play, Follow My Leader, a musical satire of Bush, Blair and the politics of the Iraq War.

'It's a vaudeville show with a very serious political purpose,' explains the easygoing Scot. 'The idea is that God comes down to Tony Blair and tells him he wants him to be a restraining influence on that man in the White House. Blair says: "I'm your man," but he turns out not to be a restraining influence at all.'

Beaton confesses the play was written in anger and is unashamedly partisan. 'I don't see why a play has to be balanced. Follow My Leader says what we did was a mistake, we were lied to and it was wrong. We're agreed about the horror of 9/11, but the responses have been supremely unintelligent and are making the world a more dangerous place.'

Nonetheless, Beaton insists he isn't preaching or offering a knee-jerk reaction to world events. 'It took me two years after Blair came to power to come round to writing Feelgood,' he says. 'It took time to understand who he is and to understand his role in international politics.

'I think this role is problematic because Blair and Bush have a simplistic, religious view of the world, dividing it into right and wrong. I find that messianic fervour, rather than analysis, very perilous.'

But doesn't satire simply allow audiences to laugh off the issues? Beaton thinks not. 'A satirist's job is to provoke awkward questions,' he says. 'Satire should give heart to people on your side and tell people their sense of outrage is not misplaced. One of the problems with satire is no one can prove what it does. Does it change people's minds? No one knows.'

However, it's significant that, in recent years, satire has been more associated with TV and radio than with theatre. Beaton reckons that's because satire works best when it's topical. 'I had the idea for this just over a year ago and in theatrical terms getting a play on in that time is really fast,' he says.

'As it happens, the politics have gone in the play's favour because it's even more topical now. The people who launched the war could have been right - a six-week war followed by peace, harmony and a nice new government. As it is, it's a mess.'

Beaton finds a wealth of satirical tradition in theatre to draw on and includes the Italian radical dramatist