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.
Sidi also animates proceedings by giving Downing Street’s chief of staff a lurid inner life, which (winningly ridiculous, this) she discloses in her “buffer language” of Spanish when things get steamy. There are intermissions, too, when suited-and-booted Sue heads to the water cooler for silent bonding with audience members.
Perhaps Sidi’s conclusion overreaches, as our new PM begins to morph into his predecessor, and Gray is proposed as a stand-in for all of us desperate for change. But if that ending feels crudely engineered, Sue is cracking company for the preceding 60 minutes, and highly relatable, relishing the perks of a Foreign Office posting (“it’s nice to go abroad, innit?”), and surfing the Asos website when she is meant to be investigating Partygate. And behind the wicked silliness and Sidi’s performing flair, there is a likably democratic impulse at play, as commonality is asserted between lofty matters of state and the humdrum lives of the rest of us. It’s more fun than a No 10 party – and legal to boot.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
