In the 43 years since NewsRevue first made merry at current affairs – it’s now the world’s longest-running live comedy show – were current affairs ever before in such a parlous state? The team, in other words, have plenty to work with – and work it they do, in this high-energy, unrelenting hour of songs and sketches. One doubts the format has changed a jot in four decades: its formula (song/sketch, blackout, plinkety-plonk piano in the darkness, then repeat) suggests cheerful obliviousness to innovations in the world of performance. And fair enough: the draw is the talent, the jokes, and the hot topicality, and NewsRevue 2022 vintage delivers them all.
The stage may be small, and the wigs cheap. But the song and dance is deftly orchestrated, and the four-strong cast hurl themselves at the material, which addresses a broad cross-section of the stories behind the recent headlines. You want stop-the-press? Here’s a Greatest Showman medley hymning “the Tory shitshow”, and a sketch rendering the party’s leadership candidates as unappetising chocolates in a selection box. You want starting-to-feel-out-of-date? Here’s a mutual appreciation duet sung by Chris Whitty (Edward Bourne) and Patrick Vallance (Charlie Keable). Elsewhere, the denizens of Londongrad recast their woes to the tune of Abba’s Money Money Money, Ant and Dec present a cost-of-living crisis gameshow, and David Attenborough stokes the Queen’s erotic fire in the most unlikely way.
Forty minutes in, the rhythm can start to feel attritional. And the ideological even-handedness has a blandifying effect: Tory-teasing skits are balanced by squibs about Keir Starmer’s inadequacies; P&O bosses are mocked, but so too striking train drivers. One might prefer one’s satire to speak from a clearer (or any) moral perspective of its own. But at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, in the venue that’s hosted NewsRevue for most of its 43 years, no one but me seemed to mind. The home crowd cheered to the rafters as Keable’s Boris remixed Jailhouse Rock, Camille Hainsworth-Staples and Phoebe Coop sent up Stepford Wife America in the post-Roe v Wade era, and another Edinburgh fringe run loomed. The government may be tottering, but NewsRevue continues, on this patch at least, to reign supreme.
At the Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh, 3–28 August.
