★★☆☆☆
Is there anything harder to pull off than a media satire? Now more than ever, when Donald Trump can tweet the mystery word “covfefe” one moment and within a few hours the world’s wags have toyed with it to the point of exhaustion, what can a playwright tell us that we don’t already suspect?
Richard Bean, purveyor of arguably the funniest stage comedy this century with One Man, Two Guvnors, fell flat with his phone-hacking satire Great Britain. Now Chris England, the man behind the comedies Breakfast With Jonny Wilkinson and An Evening With Gary Lineker, gives us this flat account of a comedian whose life unravels thanks to one stray distasteful tweet.
Jonathan Lewis’s production has a strong cast of television-famous actors, but they can’t make some tentative material come alive for long. Jason Merrells can summon up the arrogance and weariness of “national treasure” Guy Manton, the host of the hit BBC panel show Arguing the Toss, but he can’t make us believe that Guy is remotely funny. He’s simply a bit of a git when he knocks the chick-lit novels of his wife, Bex (Claire Goose, doing well in a thin role), and lacks any wit in the way that he responds to the shock arrival of Ike (Tom Moutchi), who claims to be the African child that Guy and Bex once sponsored.
England comes up with a few good jokes, especially on the tweets projected on top of Anthony Lamble’s set. He is on to something in the way that he depicts the self-congratulatory nature of contemporary outrage. Yet neither the characters nor the plot are evolved enough to stop it feeling like blatant speechifying of the playwright’s message when Guy, instead of saving his career by apologising for the lame, tossed-off gag that got him branded a racist, instead rants about our self-righteous age to a visiting journalist. Howard Beale in Network (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!”) he is not.
Justin Edwards is good as always as Guy’s loyal writer and tweeter-in-chief , while England himself is a decent foil to Merrells as his aghast manager Rupert. Yet the whole enterprise has an air of not-quite-there about it — you understand that budgets are tight at this unsubsidised but always enterprising 200-seat theatre, but this rich couple’s kitchen looks cheap, as does a video extract from Arguing the Toss that looks as if it was shot in an alleyway.
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Ike’s speech describing his brutalising time with the Walking Army of Jesus is a good bit of writing, but not one that sits easily with the larky tone that dominates. So it all ends up less than the sum of its parts.
Box office: 020 7870 6876, to July 1