Theatre
Michael Portillo - No escape
Published 16 August 2004
Theatre - This year's Fringe reflects a world consumed by conflict
Thank goodness for George Dubbya. He is such a gift to stand-up comics that the San Francisco satirist Will Durst says he'll vote for him. That's a joke, of course. On the other hand, Marcus Brigstocke, a British funny man familiar to us from Radio 4, is tearing his hair out because no gag on which he has toiled and sweated is as amusing as Bush's latest real-life foot-in-mouth about the terrorists being intent on destroying America "and so are we". Where would satire be without Bush's Iraq war? Andy Parsons quips that in the deck of cards issued to US forces, 13 of the most wanted Saddamites have a silhouette in place of a photograph. He imagines GIs waiting for dusk, hoping to catch suspicious characters in profile in order to make a positive ID.
These three perform good shows. The Edinburgh Fringe remains a wonderful showcase for comic talent. Parsons is the funniest. Alone in this trio, he wasn't wrestling the audience to get a response. This bullet-headed spoofer began his career writing for Spitting Image during its last months on air.
That set me thinking about how today's satirists, though they produce the laughs, don't shape the public's view of politics as that show used to. Think of David Steele as a tiny puppet in David Owen's breast pocket; or Margaret Thatcher, asked when ordering food with her cabinet "What about the vegetables?", replying "They'll have what I'm having"; or John Major, entirely grey, playing with his peas. Those images became political facts, defining the voters' relationship with politicians.
Perhaps no stand-up in a theatre can hope to match the power of television, but even so, I was surprised that Parsons is so gentle. True, there is menace in his slow, almost staccato delivery. He threatens to pick on people in the audience to ask their name, job and whether they are having sex with the person next to them. The trouble is that Parsons makes his fans quake more than the politicians he satirises.
Parsons swears a lot, but Brigstocke cusses more. He is monumentally un-pleasant about Cherie Blair - but, of all things, about her looks! Is that the stuff of wit? During the whole evening, the audience had doubts about his sense of humour. A neighbour infuriated him, he said, by asking if he didn't fear that an asylum-seeker would rape his wife. Brigstocke retorted with a modest proposal: if immigrants were really pouring in for that purpose, then Mrs Brigstocke could save them the trouble of leaving their homes by going on a rape tour of eastern Europe. Yes, I see what he means . . . I think.
Durst is Bush-obsessed. I wanted to yell: "Change the tape!" He was dismayed that his audience was so small. You could see him thinking: "Three weeks stuck in this backwater where no one knows me and I'm losing money." My tip is to do more cracks about Britain. He had a good joke about Tony Blair not being a poodle - a breed that can be moody and uncommunicative - but being more like a black Lab. Yet that was it; he had no riposte to questions about the UK thrown from the floor.
Maybe Durst was lured to the Edinburgh Fringe by the amazing statis- tic that it now sells a million tickets. Maybe that also explains the presence of the magnificent TAO - Beat of the Globe, given that this Japanese drumming spectacular, an extraordinary display of disciplined aggression, has its own 3,000-seat theatre, complete with hotel, on the island of Kyushu. Perhaps the Fringe's audience numbers got lost in translation.
Actors from Australia and Zimbabwe have polished up their Pommy accents to put on an engrossing production of R C Sherriff's Journey's End, but I was drawn to another First World War weepie, Private Peaceful. It is adapted by Simon Reade from Michael Morpurgo's book about an 18-year-old soldier who relives the episodes of his brief life in Devon and at the Western Front during his last hours. At dawn, he will be shot for disobedience.
I have more than an artistic interest because I was asked, when defence secretary, to consider pardoning some or all of the 290 soldiers who were executed during the Great War. I thought it wrong to apply today's judgements and standards to historical circumstances that we cannot comprehend. I believe that the trend towards apologising for events in our national history is profoundly unhistorical.
However, I'm pleased to see those horrific firing squads exposed. Paul Chequer (known from Channel 4's As If) does not allow the audience's attention to wander for a moment during his 75-minute monologue. This virtuoso performance left the young actor drenched in sweat and sobbing. I could not fault anything in his highly moving delivery. Audiences in Devon, Bristol and London will have a chance to see it next month, and it should not be missed.
As I threaded my way through festival throngs collecting flyers, it seemed that even if I could escape George W, it was hard to avoid war. Edinburgh reflects the mood of our times.
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