At this play about Dominic Cummings, the notoriously shortsighted north-east explorer, the audience played a Westminster equivalent of Where’s Wally? as a rumour circulated that the subject’s vision had sufficed for him to reach the venue.
From my sweeps, the dedicated EU outer was not, as theatre people say, “in” for Dom – The Play. But the chief of the Vote Leave campaign and Boris Johnson’s senior Downing Street adviser from 2019-20 commands the stage as played by Chris Porter, who delivers, in soft County Durham tones, a monologue apologia. It is punctuated by dialogues with Tim Hudson’s puce, buffoonish prime minister and lightning impressions of bit players from Rebecca Todd (Nicola Sturgeon, Elizabeth II) and David Mildon (Farage, Cameron, Obama etc).
Though carefully researched and written rather than improvised, the play unusually credits no dramatist. Press tickets were emailed by Lloyd Evans, theatre critic of the Spectator and author (with Toby Young) of Who’s the Daddy?, a 2005 farce about the erotic imbroglios at the rightwing magazine under Johnson’s editorship.
This latest script’s anonymity invites conspiracy theories. As a Speccie employee, Evans is perhaps minimising trouble with colleagues who include Cummings’s wife and columnists who preach a Johnson restoration. An alternative explanation is that the author is Cummings. An anonymous play about yourself would be, as admirers like to say, “classic Dom”.
Certainly, the piece would please him. Liberals hoping for a satirical demolition of the meanie in a beanie see Porter in the woolly cap only twice, for scenes of encounters with caricatured Guardian-reading remainers near his north London home. Evidence of the emphasis is that, while Johnson’s plan to build a Scotland-Ireland bridge is treated as proof of narcissistic arseholery, Cummings’s mission to land British astronauts on Mars is presented as the driving farsightedness (at least at work) that the establishment conspired to thwart. The amateur ophthalmological jaunt to Barnard Castle features only through a firm dismissal of any wrongdoing.
Yet taking a liberal villain seriously brings rewards. From the word mountain of Cummings’s theses, tweets, blogs and Substacks, the writer has isolated the most thought-provoking stuff about the use of data in campaigns and how the “remain side” made a fatal mistake of vocabulary. Two claims startled even political obsessives present: that Cameron promised Johnson George Osborne’s job as chancellor in exchange for supporting remain, and that MI5 gave Cummings transcripts of Carrie Johnson’s phone calls. If those are jokes, they feature in what otherwise seem to be verbatim sections.
These parts – resembling an unusually lengthy and fascinating Ted talk by Cummings – sometimes jar with the pantomimic idiocy, though often very funny, elsewhere. Johnson is played as a politically clueless would-be rooster to the UK’s female population, while Sturgeon’s speeches are sarcastically paraphrased rather than using her actual words.
While Cummings, on- and offstage, insists on his difference from Johnson – scholar v clown – the unknown author might usefully have explored the overlap between the men as eccentric self-promoters with a potentially dark and nasty streak. Porter’s actor’s instinct to engage the audience prevents him from exploring the refusal of charm that defines Cummings’s public persona. On press night, the projections went wrong. The character just shrugs and carries on. For future technology fails, Porter might respond as Cummings more likely would if a minion screwed up the visuals.
But while lefties will inevitably be split about a play that is enthusiastically anti-Johnson but pro-Brexit, the show goes far beyond the thin skit that publicity threatened. It felt almost surprising not to walk out into the Edinburgh festival, where this partial but engaging account of Britain’s most bizarre but also nationally transformative Downing Street aide will surely find a happy home.
Dom – The Play is at the Other Palace, London, until 5 March
