If Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and its heirs had had their way, there would be no such thing as society, community and, quite possibly, the two pieces of theatre that are this year's winners of The Arches Platform 18 award for new directors and theatre makers.

As it is, both Gary Gardiner's tellingly named Thatcher's Children and Kieran Hurley's BEATS (a response to the Criminal Justice Bill which effectively criminalised rave culture) combine historical significance and a renewed political pertinence for a younger generation who have discovered protest for themselves with renewed activist vigour.

While Gardiner's piece sets up a mock Houses of Parliament in which a series of authoritarian speakers explore the legacy of Thatcher's ideas, Hurley puts a live DJ onstage to explore one of the most absurd laws in history, which made gatherings of people listening to music with repetitive beats effectively illegal.

"I wanted to make something about young people gathering en mass," Hurley explains, "and I was attracted to the free party scene that existed during the late 1980s and early 1990s. There was an apparent 'apoliticalness' that existed in that culture in terms of a clearly defined politics, and yet someone somewhere in power was so threatened by it that they passed this law.

"So I wanted to explore what is that strange, seemingly unharnessed potential of young people en masse, but also what it is that the world of power is so afraid of when young people claim space of their own. What is it that they find so threatening? We have become used to villainising young people through the riots and so forth; but [the rave era] is such rich terrain, and it's so relevant to what's happening now."

Gardiner concurs, albeit by a different means of production.

"I'm really interested in the idea that's come into play over the last few years about living in an enterprising society," he says. "The language of innovation is prevalent at the moment. It's a really interesting shift in culture, and I wanted to trace those ideas, and found myself on the trail of Thatcher and her implementation of ideas of neo-liberalism, free markets and competition.

"There's something as well about Thatcher and absolutism and her image as an iron lady, and this idea about being the lowest of the low is somehow to be weak in her eyes. Now she's got dementia, she's become weak and feeble, and is everything she despised."

While this sounds like similar terrain to Meryl Streep's big-screen portrayal of Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Gardiner's take on things sounds less schmaltzy. Hurley too hasn't attempted a site-specific re-enactment of the era he's looking at, but is attempting what he describes as a storytelling piece, albeit one using the technical aspects of a club night.

Significantly, perhaps, Gardiner was born in 1979, the year Thatcher was swept into office. Equally pertinent, Hurley's birth-date goes back to 1984, a year significant not just for its Orwellian heritage, but for what looked like a brutal prophecy of a very English civil war.

Still flushed with her second term landslide a year before in the wake of the Falklands War, Thatcher and co took no prisoners, be they striking miners, a still leftist Labour Party or what right-wing conspiracy theorists dubbed the "enemy within". The society Thatcher claimed didn't exist is still recovering from these things.

"She changed things for ever," Gardiner observes. "We can't be anything other than Thatcher's children. Once you've accepted the economy as an essential part of policy-making, I can't see a way of moving out of that."

Both Platform 18 works arrive onstage at a time that looks closer to the early days of Thatcher's reign than ever before. With the global economic downturn creating more unemployment by the day, a by-product of this has been more direct political engagement. Crucially, this has not been via political parties, but through a grassroots underbelly that is coming increasingly to the fore.

One ongoing example of this has been the response to the Scottish Government's amendments to Public Entertainment Licences, which became law on April 1. This new legislation now requires all free events to operate with a licence where none was required before. While aimed primarily at unlicensed raves and firework displays, the wording potentially affects all DIY events, and has already seen Highlands and Islands Council attempt to charge a community group a three-figure sum to hold an Easter egg hunt and bonnet-making competition.

As with the Criminal Justice Bill of old, it has been the grassroots rather than the big institutions that have led the fight. Hurley points out other parallels.

"From that systematic attempt to persecute a particular subculture, many people were radicalised," he says, "and that in turn informed the shape and culture of political protest right up to where we are now. DIY art activism is a really important thing, and the space between what is a party and what is a protest becomes really blurred."

Thatcher's Children/BEATS, The Arches, Glasgow, April 17-21; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, April 25-28. www.thearches.co.uk and www.traverse.co.uk