The Edinburgh fringe’s best response to Brexit was its earliest. Bridget Christie re-wrote her 2016 show in the six weeks between the EU referendum and the festival’s opening weekend, and Because You Demanded It was a cracker: a howl of dismay – self-mocking, but nonetheless outraged – at what the country was doing to itself. Its topicality explains, in part, why it remains the most striking stage treatment of Britain’s exit from the EU. It appeared before Brexit became a morass. Back then, it was an uncomplicated matter of yes or no, and the practicalities were still coming into focus. Now, it’s all technicalities and politicking; worst-case scenarios v still-very-bad scenarios. It’s quicksand – for artists as well as the politicians trying to sort it out.
Brexit, the stage play by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky (with a cast consisting largely of comedians) sinks into that quicksand within its opening minutes. It imagines a new Tory PM playing the leavers in his cabinet against the remainers and committed to a policy of “frenetic inertia”, in the hope that something will turn up to save his skin. The play chronicles his first (and last?) 90 days in power, as he endlessly defers choosing between his Brexit secretary’s Europhilic proposals and his trade secretary’s “little Englander” ones. Meanwhile, his backroom fixer Paul endlessly wavers on whether to come onboard as Adam’s new chief of staff.
That’s a lot of endless dithering. And excepting Hamlet – this play is no Hamlet – it’s hard to make indecision very dramatic. Brexit goes nowhere fast; I saw it at a late-night performance where several people around me fell asleep. It’s not a good play. There’s no subtext, nothing going on at all besides the politics of which way the PM will swing. Why should we care? There are no new ideas about Brexit to recast into real life. Only a few of the jokes fly. The characters are self-seeking and unlikeable. Hal Cruttenden as the Jacob-Rhys-Mogg-meets-Boris-Johnson-style trade secretary Simon Cavendish is nothing but smirks and smarm, while Pippa Evans is all bustling briskness as his rival Diane. Brexit is one for political nerds only, and it won’t tell them anything they don’t already know.
Jonny Woo’s All Star Brexit Cabaret, over in George Square Gardens, is more successful. Created by comedian and drag act Woo and Richard Thomas, of Jerry Springer the Opera fame, it traces the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 referendum in a series of songs. There’s a leavers’ lullaby, dedicated to his Eurosceptic dad, putting to bed the idea that Europhobes must be “swivel-eyed loons”. And remainers are mocked, too, as complacent metropolitans and hipsters: “I know that it should bother me / But I can’t vote: it’s Glastonbury.”
Perhaps the show subscribes too readily to the questionable idea that Brexit divided Britain along working-class v middle-class lines. But there’s plenty of fun to be had, as Jayde Adams plays a spivvy, scheming Johnson and the cast don pigs’ snouts for a David Cameron number (“What the Fuck Have I Done?”). Finally, the show abandons evenhandedness, caricaturing the Britain that leavers seek as a place where “Russell Harty [and] processed ham” reign supreme. It ends with Woo rightly lamenting the idiocy of Cameron’s binary vote on this complex question, and with a song inviting Europhiles to Hold on to Your Dreams.
But its highlight – and the most expressive piece of Brexit commentary I’ve seen at this year’s fringe – isn’t in these polemical final stages. That comes when the cabaret artist Le Gateau Chocolat makes his guest appearance. First up, he plays Nigel Farage, the satire of which is largely – gloriously – in the casting. Later, he’s charged with expressing in song Remainers’ feelings on waking on 24 June 2016 to discover the result of the EU referendum. The man’s voice is extraordinary, his bass notes so low they sound like subterranean drilling and make your insides rumble. The song, it turns out, is not a song at all, just a wail, an appeal to the heavens, a broken cri de coeur as our awful future comes into focus. “O-o-o-o-h,” he wails, “o-o-o-o-h,” again, then finally, “o-o-o-o-h – shit!” It’s just a sound, but it’s more effective than all the words in Salinsky and Khan’s play at nailing where we are at with Brexit. It should become our new national anthem immediately.
- Brexit is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
- Jonny Woo’s All Star Brexit Cabaret is at Assembly George Square Gardens, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
- Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.
