Bawdy ‘Boris’ vows to make Scotland great
Boris Live At Five (Auditorium at Museum, Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh) ★★★★✩
THE smoking battlefield of British politics is on full view at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, with its skewered ambitions, blasted careers and charred reputations.
And where better to start than with the wounded Boris himself, as actor Will Barton serves up a caustic tour de farce playing the deposed PM in Jonathan Maitland’s bawdy satire Boris Live At Five. Barton and Maitland achieve the almost miraculous feat of pleasing those who love Boris as well as those who loathe him — of whom there a very great many in Scotland.
Nor do the creators of this mock Q&A go easy on the Scots, as Barton’s dishevelled Bojo greets the Edinburgh crowd with ‘Hello Glasgow!’ before offering to make Scotland great… ‘for the first time in its history’.
It’s a seriously Chaucerian performance with one of the questions Boris plucks from a bucket asking: ‘What sex position best represents your time in Government?’ The idea of ‘Rexit’ (rejoining the EU) he likens to having a vasectomy, followed by a reverse vasectomy and then a reverse-reverse vasectomy.
And on the question of if he’s been lucky with his opponents he quickly agrees, singling out ‘Starmer the Embalmer’. Not only is Maitland’s dialogue bluer than a Tory party conference, it’s also bang up to the minute.
But it’s Barton’s gleefully disreputable turn as Johnson that makes this a cracker, giving Boris the full Barry Humphries/Les Patterson treatment. He leerily propositions ladies, rebukes SNP ‘ extremists’ and asserts support for lorry drivers (‘I’m HGV-positive!’).
The Old Etonian gets another caning in Boris III (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★✩✩ ), which imagines Johnson taking the title role in Shakespeare’s tragedy Richard III in a chaotic (and allegedly real) school production. Boris hasn’t read the play, doesn’t know his lines — and has been bonking the sister of an actress who’s meant to be his girlfriend.
His solemn promise beneath his blond thatch is that ‘it will never happen again’. Ooh and he’s in trouble for an illegal party in the dorms. Harry Kershaw makes a good fist of the teenage Boris, but this does feel like a flimsy caper. It also lapses into a ‘lessons learnt’ exercise as the teacher supervising the show reminds Boris that the king cannot play the clown. Boris counters: ‘They knew what I was like when they gave me the part.’
O N THE other side of town, Tim Walker’s Remainers’ lament Bloody Difficult Women ( Assembly Rooms, ★★★✩✩ ) is a tidily rendered account of Gina Miller’s legal bid to force a vote on leaving the EU during Theresa May’s premiership.
Amusingly, May has forbidden mentioning the name of Boris, and he is only referred to as ‘the Foreign Secretary’. Miller comes across as decent but dull, while May comes across as dull but decent — and anyway, we know how it ends.
Dramatic interest is created instead by a profane character assassination of a former editor of this paper, which sends a hot blast of colour through the constipated corridors of power. Ironically, it’s the most entertaining role, despite actor Andrew Woodall’s fidgety efforts to play it down.
Talking of being lucky in your enemies, the Tories can take heart from Exodus (Traverse, ★✩✩✩✩ ), produced by the National Theatre of Scotland. Rather pathetically, they fail to lay a satirical glove on the Government in a fictional Tory leadership contest in which a photo opp on the south coast goes wrong when a baby is washed up, Moses like, at the feet of the Home Secretary.
Although clearly modelled on Priti Patel, the real-life Home Secretary has nothing to fear from Uma Nada-Rajah’s play, which fails to fully exploit the time-bomb potential of the infant she reluctantly rescues and stows away on a train back to London
None of the characters are credible, with the possible exception of the hatchet-faced, control-freak press officer (Sophie Steer). Worse, Debbie Hannan’s production looks like something out of the BBC’s Balamory. Is this really their best shot?
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