Playing Maggie to a T

Here is an iconic 1980s tableau. At a long polished table in a grand room sit a lot of mute men in grey suits. In their midst is a small oasis of bright blue, topped by a vanilla whip of blonde perm. Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet yesmen are discussing the Falklands. Apparently, the islands have been invaded, and the PM is vexed that no one can confirm this. Her voice hardens, her cold blue eyes stare, and suddenly the temperature seems to drop. Everyone shivers. "Cut!" calls the director.

The Iron Lady is rather softer in appearance than memory suggests. That's because, in The Falklands Play, she is being played by Patricia Hodge. "I'm not trying to be forbidding," she says, her sculpted hair encased in a net during her lunch break. "I'm trying to deliver the intentions of each scene. That scene is about frustration." I stand corrected, like a quivering Tory wet.

The Falklands Play was commissioned from Ian Curteis for the war's fifth anniversary in 1987, but for murky political reasons the BBC never took it into production. It has now been picked up for the 20th anniversary, this week. Separate recordings will be broadcast, unprecedently, on both Radio 4 (on Saturday at 2.30pm) and BBC4 television (next Wednesday at 9pm). Mrs Thatcher may have presided over a huge rise in unemployment, but on the plus side she kept a large sisterhood of impersonators off the dole. Hodge now joins them.

The first person to grab the handbag was Janet Brown, on The Mike Yarwood Show. Then Faith Brown (who, logically, is now playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard) toured her on the cabaret circuit, and Angela Thorne took her into the West End in John Wells's 1981 hit Anyone for Denis?

For radio, she was played by Sally Grace on Weekending (Radio 4) and June Whitfield on The News Huddlines (Radio 2). "She had very different styles," says Grace. "Very intense and quiet, or shouting at the dispatch box. I seized every opportunity to watch her to make sure I was up to speed." But the longest work-in-progress is Steve Nallon's. Because Steven Berkoff gave up on the idea of playing "Maggot Scratcher" himself in his 1986 play Sink The Belgrano! (Maggie Steed and then Louise Gold got the job), Nallon remains the sisterhood's only male infiltrator. He first mimicked her at school aged 15 in 1975. "Everybody else picked up on the interview voice," he recalls. "On Spitting Image I went for the House of Commons aggression."

"It's a constructed voice," says Maureen Lipman, whose impersonation has been heard at many informal events as well as on stage and TV. "It's something she learned, so therefore anybody else can learn it." Her own route in was through the feet and legs. "Once you've got the walk you've got her: the grip on the bag, the slightly turned-in feet." Nallon adds that "Her centre of gravity is outside herself."

Sylvia Syms wore a corset to get a sense of Mrs T's erectness in Thatcher: The Final Days. But she also researched her subject face-to-face. "I don't think she ever relaxed in a chair. I once went to a dinner where there was red wine spilled. I remember catching her eye and giving her a grin. It was like watching through glass. You got nothing at all."

Hodge has gone for a "representation" rather than an impersonation. Unlike most Thatcher mimics, she watched no newsreels and confined herself to reading The Downing Street Years. "Other performances have been satirical and so have taken the mickey. In The Falklands Play you have to know what kind of mind produced the choices that were made."

In uniform, Syms found that "cast members were no longer matey"; similarly, nobody would sit next to Lipman. "I found that too," says Nallon. "You've got no perception of what you look like in the outfit."

For all her protestations that she's not "doing" Maggie, when Hodge had got the suit on she couldn't control the Pavlovian reaction of those around her. "At the Granada studios we sat in the canteen. As far as I was concerned I was me eating, but I noticed that every head was turning with a degree of shock. It was then that I was aware of her physical presence."