Fringereviews
He does Johnson with an entirely empty Etonian drawl that delightfully trails off into nothing, but what can jokes about the no-deal, crazy Tories led by a buffoon, and the Corbynista anti-semitism, really tell us?
He finds his feet with Rory Stewart, deliciously ordering a pint of water in absurdly drawn-out fashion, and gains more traction dishing it out to the SNP. His vision of the coming Boris and Donald parade makes you wince, and you’d take a whole hour of his Trump.
A musical seems a more promising way to lance the Brexit boil; the whole thing has that Weimar cabaret feel, redolent of a former Great Power turning nostalgically to nationalism.
James Ringer-beck as Boris, in
channels freely under a massive blonde wig from Mick Jagger, a young Tom Stoppard, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. His Boris has a nice sense of self-doubt, looking sideways at himself and what he’s made.
The production is almost very good. Highlights include the lovehate romance sung between Boris and Govey, played by Polly Bycroftbrown, a vocal and physical fireball who also nails roles from a Brexit rapper to a hooded hag with a walkon part as Scotland. And Natasha Lanceley’s David Cameron does a nice line in nasty bed-time Brexit stories. In a full house, on an aisle seat, it seemed that the right hand side of the audience was roaring with laughter, while the left was a bit lost – perhaps, as per Forde, betokening a lurking sense that we know it’s all a screw-up, and we’ve decided who to blame. The Blowfish company cast then go on to do Trump the Musical in the very next slot, bless them.
A canny Scottish friend speculates that Boris might even try and reverse devolution, with Trump’s blessing, after the Nationalists refused to meet him. Now there’s an interesting drama, ripe material for the likes of Scottish comic Mark Nelson, who engaged his audience in a far smaller space than Forde’s in his show
He tries for a give-and-take exchange with a couple of Brexiteers, and a German and an Italian. The best moment is when we shout down the luridly loud American act next door. The show meanders, digressing into marital sex as well as the politics. He says he first wrote his Brexit show last year, but has had to remake it five times. The advantage of the Scottish angle? We don’t own this mess. But it has polarised our relations with England.
You learn more about what you don’t know about Brexit in 45 minutes with Geoffrey Brown’s
than days of reading commentators – along with a luxury selection of the best Brexit one-liners, cartoons, and cliff-edge graphs. Brown runs an EU consultancy called Euclid, advising the arts and culture sector on how to access EU funding; he has done this show four years in a row, and expects this to be the last.
Worried about how long it’ll take us to leave the EU? Check how long it took us to get in. Can you name the four presidents of Europe? How many people work at the European Commission? (“’alf of them”.) What happens if the Germans ban exports of sausage and cheese? How many Brexiteers does it take to change a light bulb? How did David Cameron describe Dominic Cummings? And you really, really don’t want to hear the odds on a no-deal.