Sue Gray is one of the most recognisable names in the UK, but few of us know a thing about her. Into that breach steps Emma Sidi with her new fringe show, which imagines not what Gray might be like, but how most funnily to portray her. So in lieu of a tight-lipped bureaucrat, we get an indiscreet blabbermouth, and a take on the higher echelons of power that is less Yes Minister, more EastEnders. “Do we remember lockdown?” asks Sidi’s Sue of her audience. “Fuck that shit!” I don’t remember that phrase in the Partygate report.
It is a brilliant idea, but does it sustain for a whole show? Yes – because the character is gregarious, bringing a willing audience into her gossipy confidence, but also because the Starstruck star structures the hour deftly around Gray’s trajectory from unknown “civvy serv” staffer turned scourge of Boris Johnson to left-hand woman to Keir Starmer. The latter is, in smitten Sue’s parlance, “dripping in rizz”: her complex chemistry with first Sunak and then Starmer forms one of the show’s loopier subplots.
