Simon Collins is delightfully entertained by David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy at the Richmond Theatre...
OUR VERDICT
The premise of the play is ridiculous or humorous - depending on your age.
The teenage son of a multi-billionaire is not obliged to attend a toff’s school where he could vitalise the gene pool of the 1% and hope eventually to join the cast of Made in Chelsea; instead he finds himself at a normal comprehensive.
On his first day he offers a fellow fat kid £50 to come last in a cross-country run in order to save himself the disgrace, and the mockery, and worse, that would follow. Soon enough the school bullies find him out anyway.
The distorting effect on personal relationships caused by money is the hub of the story.
The violent contrast between Joe Spud’s inordinate wealth and the base material want of everyone else prompts all sorts of comic absurdities such as the dinner lady asking him for £10,000 to pay for her hip replacement.
So she says, but later returns to the food counter proudly sporting a magnificent new bosom, stunning hair-do, and a painted face seemingly saturated in Botox. It’s not enough; now she clutches her behind and wishes her arse done.
That brief episode supplies just one bunch of laughs among many in a show intended only to entertain.
The tyranny of heartless industrialists or the pathos of poor little rich kids doomed to the fate of Christina Onassis are left aside in favour of sheer fun to please an audience of children. It’s a half-term treat for kids and their parents.
Everything is in primary colours. There are singing and dancing at the drop of a hat, numerous scene changes, comic tropes galore, from funny walking, gurning and oddball characters to gross food and ingenious wordplay.
What particularly made the children laugh were clever rhymes in the rapping contest.
The play’s basic conceit is about bottoms. Children and grown comedians always seem to enjoy scatological humour but why are poops amusing? The impressive set design by Jacqueline Trousdale is built out of thousands of toilet rolls.
Joe’s father, Len, became a bog roll billionaire having invented a type of toilet paper moist on one side yet dry on the other. “He revolutionised the way we wipe our bottoms.” Raj, the proprietor of the local corner shop, declares, “My bottom has never been so sparkling. You could eat your dinner off it.” The young audience roars.
When I mentioned to the director, Neal Foster, that children are a tough crowd, notoriously difficult to keep attentive in a theatre, he replied that he aimed to maintain a high energy level on stage throughout with lots of new things happening.
And indeed the drama unfolds rapidly moment-to-moment even while the overall narrative of false friends and true, lost then found again, proceeds at a stately pace up to the final moral of love counting more than money.
Poor Joe is at last reconciled with his father discovering his favourite possession is a toy rocket his dad once made for him out of the cardboard tubes of toilet rolls. He realises, “All that money never really made us happy.”
A curious aspect of the production, not intended as comic in itself, is that the actors, all of them bar one excellent, are adults playing children’s roles. It is a Bugsy Malone in reverse.
The most powerful element of the play, however, is its presentation of a young child’s outlook on the world, a psychological state younger than that of the personalities in the story.
This is the realm of being the characters inhabit, exuberant, colourful and without complexity. But peculiar too in the way of Walliams literary idol, Roald Dahl. Clearly, Walliams and his audience feel at home, at least for a while, in this delightful, madcap, bottom-up world.
Venue: Richmond Theatre
Dates: 30th October – Saturday 2nd November
Ticket prices: from £23.50 (click here to book)
