ANOTHER KIND OF INQUIRY
I suppose we will have to wait a few years for the dust to settle and James Graham to write a nuanced play about the Boris-Covid-Tory-pocalypse. Meanwhile this 80-minute storm of fury from Armando Ianucci will do very nicely. It’s directed by Patrick Marber at a furious pace, from the first descent from heaven of a tousled blond wig onto the head of Paul Chahidi as “Orbis Rex”, to the striking finale of the entire group violently fighting one another in the trapdoor entrance of Hell itself. They are all clad in black, with the odd pantaloon , and tights (though the character of “Richer Sooner” obviously has too-short trousers) there’s a stovepipe hat or two, and they often speak in rhyming couplets.
Eng-Lit graduates will have expected that cod-17c costuming, from the retro framing announcement; “Being a Scornful Account of the Activities of Mr Boris Johnson and Others during the Pandemic and its Aftermath” . Ianucci’s inspiration is largely Milton, but also nods to Dryden’s satirical Absalom and Achitophel, a mock-heroic epic about Charles II, Whigs, the Popish Plot etc, and chucks in a few Shakespeare lines as well. The author has talked of the Greek heroics, but this feels more like our own 17-18c takes on the form: it’s a good model, and once the great monchrome backdrop descends with its Grim Reaper skeleton, the mood reflects the age of furious, debunking, coffee-house rationalism. With a lot of necessary laughs.
There’s a sparky virtuoso cast of five doing it all: Faye Castelow, Debra Gillett, Natasha Jayetileke and Amalia Vitale, gathere around Chahidi’s magnificent rendering of “Orbis” (get the anagram?). He declares “I am a god, descended onto this withering globe..” and after a bit of dithering over two scrolls for Remain and Leave, rises to power amid his confreres, veiled by joke names but all too familiar: Gove curly and earnest, Jaytileke as a glorious tap-dancing Rishi, Cummings memorably described as “a day-long shout on legs” wearing boxing kit. Dido Harding in a jockey cap, put unsupervised in charger of Test and Trace after fouling up at TalkTalk, protests only mildly that “ability to control a flood of data’ is hardly her forte. Above all there’s Matt Hemlock, a creature conjured from a swamp: “poisonous ooze incarnate, and born to take the blame!”. The green slithering is something to behold, as he assembles his “circle of friends” to sell him dodgy PPE, and finds love and a grope in a flashbulb moment.
There’s much bravura in occasional chainmail from Orbis himself: when two calm white-coated scientists tell him about the vaccine and he ceases dithering for a moment to send out an Agincourt of needles like arrows; there’s Jacob Rhesus-Monkey explaining how the cake was wholly responsible for attacking his lord and master, and a vast pink frocked “TrustLess” who becomes a pink collapsing jelly at the question “have you costed anything?’.
You get the idea. More than fun, a necessary rage, elegant mock-heroics. Some wonderful lines from our hero, as when the police turn up accompanied by a hooded, grating, weirdly ghostly Sue Gray – “I am Orbis Rex, and wht I feel is more solid than facts or law”. But Ianucci does give us a few more sombre moments, the poetry – doggerel but effective – suddenly rising to express the enormity of lockdown losses, “Mocking the dead with rivers of wine…cries of pain and anger stilled…goodbyes by broadband”. Before the final chaotic mass-Breughelian-descent into a brawling hell, Orbis realizes he was never a god at all, and that his classical deities were all in his own head. That’s an odd unexpected bit of psychology, stilling the rage for a moment. But then there’s the hellscape, all that is left after the brawl a sad dishevelled blond wig. And finally the cast infomring us that never mind, there were heroes all the time: it was us, the people, who worked and loved and cared and kept the rules while “dunces “ danced above.
Fair enough. Quicker and less pompous than the real Inquiry. And I gather that Ianucci donated proceeds from the book that spawned it to Mental Health UK.
sohotheatre.com. to 6 Jan
theatreCat 