I won’t pretend I’ve ever before pictured Boris Johnson doing the hokey cokey with Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Yet we’re treated to this surreal spectacle in Jonathan Maitland’s new play, which swerves from satire to the broadest of broad comedy as it revisits the emotive story of Brexit and ponders the nature of political ambition.
The first half focuses on the Islington dinner in February 2016 where Johnson and Michael Gove decided to back the Leave campaign. Over lamb stew they reveal their desires and enthusiasms — Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s rather prim Gove is an unlikely fan of The Only Way is Essex. Also present, though thinly sketched, are their wives, Marina Wheeler (Davina Moon), and Sarah Vine (Arabella Weir), along with Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev, played by Tim Wallers.
Will Barton isn’t the spitting image of Boris Johnson but does an impressive job of capturing his mannerisms and intonation. One moment he’s bumbling around his kitchen in a bike helmet, the next furiously denouncing his enemies as pygmies. Yet in Maitland’s balanced portrait he comes across as a genuinely relatable figure, despite his red-blooded excesses.
The second half jumps ahead to 2029 and the possibility of Boris rising once again. Dominic Raab is Prime Minister, Gove has become a pious clergyman, and Sunderland apparently looks like Chernobyl — albeit with more places to buy sandwiches. The script contains some far better jokes than this, but little insight or analytical wit. Maitland has a weakness for recycling his favourite gags, as well as for clunky exposition in which people tell each other things they must already know. Boris’s supposedly inspirational visions of past leaders feel like the stuff of an end-of-term skit, and there’s a disappointing tendency to deliver the satire not with a rapier, but with a blunder-buss.
Until June 8 (020 7870 6876, parktheatre.co.uk)
