This highly topical political situation comedy begins in February 2016, shortly after the date of the EU referendum was set. Boris is transfixed by the dilemma about which side to back.
OUR VERDICT
A dinner party at the home of Boris and his then-wife Marina: Michael Gove, his wife, Sarah Vine, and Evgeny Lebedev, the ebullient owner of the Evening Standard are the guests. All are eager to know which way Boris will go.
There is a telephone call from Oliver Letwin, heard on speakerphone, representing David Cameron and unctuously persuasive in the attempt to get Boris to commit to remaining.
In the course of the evening, Boris entertains fantasy visits by Winston Churchill, whose biography he has recently written, and by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, each of whom urges him towards their favoured EU option.
During these interludes, the other guests are stilled and fall silent, oblivious to Boris’s imagined conversations.
After the Goves and Lebedev have left, Marina goes to bed and Boris is left alone, continuing to ponder. Further exchanges with Churchill-Thatcher-Blair ensue and eventually, in an atmosphere of shock and awe, whilst standing and stamping on the dining table, he dramatically, triumphantly and very loudly shouts his decision to back leave.
We are then taken rapidly through the events that lead to the present, Boris having in the interim been elected PM and won a big majority in the December 2019 election.
The second act is set in 2029. There are comic surprises and dramatic reversals of fortune suffered by some of the main characters in the Brexit saga, and there are some bizarre new juxtapositions: Dominic Cummings is now working for Kim Jong Un.
There is wide scope here, from some political points of view, for schadenfreude. Boris is working on his memoirs and is wrestling with yet another binary, career-defining decision.
The comedy is performed with brio. Johnson and Gove, brilliantly played by Will Barton and Bill Champion achieve a close, or close enough, resemblance to their originals to be instantly recognisable and instantly funny, aided by a cartoonish focus on characteristic habits such as Boris’s purposeful dishevelment and shambling gait and Gove’s stiffly erect posture, pompous manner and clipped enunciation.
However, some of the comedy may now be a little out of date. A note in the programme mentions that the play was first performed in May 2019.
Elsewhere we are told that ‘lines will be added here and there as events decree’. Circumstances and perspectives have changed hugely in the last ten months, perhaps too much and too quickly to keep up with.
In this new context the reliance for laughs on the image of Boris as a joke politician, lurching from one ludicrous wheeze to another and his reputation for ill-discipline in both his private life and in public policy matters, does seem somewhat overdone; the buffoonery is over-emphasised whilst the intelligent and serious politician is underplayed or ignored altogether.
Even so, it was a lively, entertaining and enjoyable evening.
At the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford 24-29 February, book here.
