Arts & Culture
Playing at politics
Published 13 November 1998
Theatre byKate Kellaway
There is a madwoman in the cellar of No 10 Downing Street. Her name is Margaret Thatcher. Her triple-stringed pearls are intact but her twin-set suit, though tightly buttoned, is adrift with cobwebs. She needs dusting but does not know it. She is, in Sylvia Syms' entertaining portrayal of her, a merry but slightly sinister ghost. She still sees herself as the most influential person in the country. She carries about her person a "Thatcher extractor", a sort of portable Hoover designed to suck socialism out of the body. It seems to work on Tony Blair - and she is pleased with him.
Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali have done wisely to include Thatcher in their satire of new Labour, Ugly Rumours. For Blair does not lend himself to biting comedy quite as naturally as Thatcher has always done. The problem is that in life Blair resembles a moderately talented actor who has been badly directed (think of his awful over-emphatic rendition of Corinthians 14 at Diana's funeral; he made it sound as though he were trying to sell love as party policy).
In this production, Blair is played by a moderately talented actor (Neil Mullarkey) but at least he has been well directed by Christopher Morahan and Stephen Rayne. Tony-Boy, as he is known, has a habitual look of aggrieved naivety. He is someone who wants others to agree with him at any cost. ("Let's just agree to agree. I love agreements.") He shows a child's bafflement when crossed. He slaps the word "new" on everything, even referring to the "new future". I laughed aloud at Blair's re-write of Churchill's "fight them on the beaches" speech which includes the revision: "We must go down to the beaches with some fluffy towels." But Tony-Boy is, elsewhere, more depressing than amusing. He is nothing like so much fun as Mrs Thatcher.
More sport is to be had with Cherie Blair (brilliantly played by Carla Mendonca), otherwise known as Cherry-Pop. She dangles in the play like her sparkling but pointless New Age pendant, practising her painful smile and making brittle remarks about life as an "ordinary" QC. She has enough intelligence to suspect that Tony is being spoilt by power.
Much more powerful than Blair or his wife, though, and competing even with Thatcher are two PR girls: Polly Mendacity (Jaye Griffiths) and Charlie Ferrago (Carla Mendonca again). Charlie looks after Gordon Brown (known here as Gordon Macduff); Polly minds Blair. The women, dressed in black, behave with the mindless energy of a pair of over-keen aerobics instructors. I tired of them quickly. They are sadly necessary to the story but are wrapping without substance. Bunny Christie's design is a more interesting, slick package: the screen at the back of his set an inescapable reminder of television's role in politics.
Gordon Brown/Macduff (Gordon Kennedy) is steeped in quasi-Shakespearean quotes so far that should he wade no more returning were as tedious as to go o'er. He is mainly in the grip of a Hamlet fantasy: his "father" is the late John Smith (Tony Selby), who keeps appearing to tell him that he finds new Labour's policies (and Brown's last Budget) "horrible, horrible, most horrible".
Rupert Murdoch (Tony Selby again) is nastily and amusingly rendered as the reluctant, foul-mouthed God with a toy koala bear on his knee and a map of the world in front of him. He is boorish, domineering and, it is dismally clear, made of much stronger stuff than any of the politicians with whom he plays. Richard Branson is also wonderfully rendered as "Biggles", borne aloft by red balloons and boasting fatuously that his company is "always moving".
The production is always moving, too, the structure of the play sees to that: it is organised into sound - or sight - bites. The structure is appropriate to the play's bleak vision of a world where politics is debilitated by technology (we are definitely in the digital age here). The writing is properly aggressive and, as the PR girls would say, "on-message". But there is an obvious difficulty about satirising blandness that Ali and Brenton never quite overcome. In a programme note we are told that "the play takes place in a very real world". Not so. This is a very unreal world that weirdly excludes ordinary people and their problems. But that, presumably, is the point.
"Ugly Rumours" continues at The Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 (0171-328 1000) until 28 November
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