Thatcher's nemesis Geoffrey Howe takes centre stage in new play

The grey, unassuming Sir Geoffrey Howe, now Lord Howe of Aberavon, is not many people's idea of a political hero - but a new play opening in north London aims to change that.

Dead Sheep focuses on the events leading up to Howe's infamous 1990 resignation speech, in which he savaged his long-time boss and one-time political soulmate Margaret Thatcher.

That speech - one of the first to be shown on television live from the House of Commons - was the beginning of Thatcher's downfall as prime minister.

It was all the more remarkable because no one thought Howe had it in him to be Thatcher's political assassin. Least of all Thatcher herself.

Howe had been at her side as her chancellor, foreign secretary and deputy prime minister since the very beginning of her reign in Downing Street.

But he was often viewed as an ineffectual yes-man, and was someone she increasingly treated with impatience and disdain, in front of cabinet colleagues.

The play's title comes from one of the most widely-quoted political put-downs of all time, when Labour's Denis Healey described being attacked by Howe as like being "savaged by a dead sheep".

Howe's frustration at Thatcher's increasingly strident anti-EU stance at a time when he was trying to negotiate Britain's membership of the European Exchange Rate mechanism, and his demotion to the "non-job" of deputy prime minister, was the trigger for his resignation.

His resignation speech, given two weeks after he quit the cabinet, stunned the Commons into silence, as he compared himself to a cricketer who had been sent out to the crease, only to discover his bat had been smashed by the team's captain.

But in an era packed with larger-than-life Conservative politicians such as Michael Heseltine, Alan Clark and Thatcher herself, the famously uncharismatic Howe is still not the obvious choice to place centre stage.

"I just admire him so much because he really, really meant it. In all these films and plays I've seen he gets treated like a shifty-eyed buffoon and I was thinking 'No!,'" playwright Jonathan Maitland told BBC News after the play's opening night.

"I've read his book umpteen times. He agonised over it and he really, really cared.

"And it was a very difficult thing for him to do and he stood up and did the right thing for his country and his party and I just think that's incredibly heroic. He's just a hero. He's a political hero."

Maitland is hoping Dead Sheep will strike a chord with fellow Howe fans.

"A lot of people have nursed a secret admiration for him, because he's like Captain Mainwaring meets William Gladstone."

The play focuses on Howe's relationship with the two formidable women in his life - Margaret Thatcher and his wife Elspeth. Maitland describes him as a "panda between two lionesses".

"It's a personal drama. It's a love story. Two types of marriage - Geoffrey's and Elspeth's, and Geoffrey's and Margaret's. One's a traditional marriage, one's a political marriage."

He admits to using a bit of dramatic licence when it comes to portraying Howe's wife, played by Jill Baker, in the Lady Macbeth mould - a key scene sees Elspeth, encouraging a hesitant Howe, played by James Wilby, to go for the jugular in his resignation speech.

"The truth is she saw the speech the night before and she said 'are you sure you want to go that far?'

"That's not very dramatic, so in the play, he's written a stinker, he feels bad about it, she turns him round and inspires him to write a better one."

Elspeth did inspire the speech, insists Maitland, "not quite the way it appears in the play but I don't think anyone will accuse us of being dishonest."

He admits it was a risk casting a man, Steve Nallon, as Thatcher. Nallon, who voiced Thatcher on Spitting Image, gives a pitch perfect reproduction of Thatcher's voice and mannerisms.

"He gives it a kind of comic energy which it otherwise wouldn't have, if an ordinary actress was playing Thatcher," says Maitland.

"He gives an incredible performance and it's a risk I'd take every day of the year."

Maitland believes the play has a lot of contemporary relevance, particularly with the ongoing debate about Britain's relationship with Europe, but above all, he says: "I wanted it to be a love letter to old style politics, where being rubbish on TV didn't matter.

"And I think it tells us that's OK to stick to your guns and do something that's really unpopular and to fall on your sword. Because so many politicians these days wouldn't have the guts to do that."

Maitland, a former BBC journalist, has spoken about the paucity of right wing drama on the British stage, but he tells me: "I wouldn't want anyone to think this is a right wing play.

"What it is, is not a left wing play. I just think it's healthy and desirable, as does Nicholas Hytner, the departing director of the National Theatre, to have plays that don't always come at it from the left."

Dead Sheep, by the Cahoots Theatre Company, is at the Park Theatre, in Finsbury Park, external, until 9 May.