Keenly anticipated since its summer announcement, Pandemonium finds the last seven years of British government dissected by two of the great satirists of the age, Armando Iannucci and his director, Patrick Marber. Told by the five-strong Pandemonium Players in cod-Jacobethan costume and blank verse, it traces the rise and fall of Boris Johnson from the moment he chose his Brexit side (“To be in, or not to be in …”) to his condemnation to hell in the wake of Partygate. On the one hand, it’s the hottest ticket in town. On the other – well, is “the Johnson-Truss-Sunak years retold in all their horrible glory” really any way to spend a spare evening?
My reservation with these dramatic-satirical renderings of Johnson and co (Boris the Third at the Edinburgh fringe last year is one example) is that they tend, if only by putting him centre-stage, to perpetuate the myth of his charisma and significance. Pandemonium does not make that mistake. It treats Johnson, correctly, as a small, weak man, awash in his delusions. His cronies – Riches Sooner, Less Trust, Matt Hemlock – don’t fare much better. There’s a sense in which Pandemonium is wish fulfilment, offering the public spectacle (more thoroughly and entertainingly than the Covid inquiry can) of a ruling class confronted with their squalor. In its own localised way, it’s the post-pandemic catharsis we’ve never yet had.
It’s that quality of moral wrath that stops Pandemonium being just a retread of what we’ve all had quite enough of – that and the jokes, of course. Iannucci and Marber have great fun here with the conventions of ye olde dramatic performance, as characters eavesdrop on one another’s asides, drop Shakespeare samples, and set up couplets with words that are hard to rhyme. They don’t stint, either, on satirical caricature, with broad and funny depictions of Hancock (half-human, half creature from a bog), tenacious-as-a-cockroach Michael Go and Suella Bovverboy hatching megalomaniac plans.
The evening’s biggest laugh finds Liz Truss collapsing in on herself like a deflated balloon when confronted with the simple question, “have you costed anything?” There’s also a choice visual gag about Eat Out to Help Out. And then there’s Johnson, whose personal brush with Covid is depicted as a heroic, chainmail-clad quest, and for whom the vaccine roll-out is an Arthurian battle of clashing swords and vanquished foes.
In blond mop-top, Paul Chahidi brings the ex-PM to vivid life with no recourse to mimicry. The whole company is terrific, with Amalia Vitale as the lagoon-dwelling health secretary a standout. It’s a stratum of satire appropriate to the baroque incompetence and malevolence of this government. But what will linger about Pandemonium is the moral outrage, expressed in sometimes captivating verse – and evoked most forcibly here by Dominic Cummings no less, in a dream sequence that conjures the enormity of the mismatch between the nation’s tragedy and the people presiding over it. Not only as a pointed, playful political pantomime, but also as a document of our times, it’s unimpeachable.
At Soho theatre, London, until 13 January
