Pandemonium: Armando Iannucci’s Covid satire feels like a late-night student revue
Armando Iannucci has given such comic bounty to the world in the shape of The Day Today, The Thick of It and Veep that we expect a good deal more from him than most; but, by the same token, we must also incline to forgive him when he falls disappointingly short.
Pandemonium – Iannucci’s debut stage-work – will appeal to those who, at this drunken, festive time, crave an ephemeral lark at the expense of the governing class who “partied” during lockdown and otherwise made a hash of things. And with the Covid inquiry having brought Boris Johnson back into the frame, his resume of recent national travails in “heightened form” has a thimbleful of topicality.
The fact that the run is already sold-out indicates the level of demand, curiosity and its author’s renown. But, really, the show – an 80-minute divertissement – joins the tottering pile of theatrical attempts to roast Johnson’s reputation only to encounter the usual problem that an air of bumbling buffoonery is baked into his shtick; yet another caricature feeds into his knack for self-mythologising. There’s the added issue that it’s hard to separate entertainment at the expense of failures during the pandemic from a due sense of responsibility to those who fell sadly foul of them.
While the cast of five, directed by Patrick Marber and dressed in tunics and hose of Puritan dourness, approach the text sufficiently deftly to give us sobering moments – when the stark reality behind the cartoon verbiage bites – a queasy-making tone of japing jollity generally prevails. The show has the aura of a rambunctious, iffy-taste student revue, and it comes as little surprise to glean that Iannucci’s satire – which follows in the tradition of Alexander Pope’s withering state of the nation mock-heroic epic The Dunciad - draws on his knowledge of Milton, whom he once studied in depth.
Structured in five cod-Latinate parts, the piece is framed as the paradise lost of Boris – sorry, “Orbis” (god-spawned “world king, begetter of a thousand children”) who, exiled, looks back at how he battled the virus like some goodly knight, from the wretched vantage of 2023, when the ruined, “septic isle” of Albion has cladding “made from crepe-paper” and train tracks “starting in London and ending up in the bin”.
Pithy and surreal phrase-making is Iannucci’s forte and there’s plenty of that, as familiar grotesques pop up around a small ‘star-chamber’ pentagonal stage (with the Grim Reaper as a back-drop) to interact with Paul Chahidi’s blond-wigged, crazed-eyed, soliloquising kingpin.
There’s an oozing Matt Hemlock – canoodling with “Gina” and trying to do “human things”; Sir Patrick Balance (“We lock-down now, or is your brain made of gravy?”); Riches Sooner, his grasping side-kick sprite; plus Carrie Hisbaby, Jacob Rhesus Monkey, and a frightful, ball-gowned Less Trust, who drolly dwindles on the spot at the inquiry “Have you costed anything?”. Etc, etc. Despite a due glint of energising spleen, it’s all remarkably cosy and safe; a lot of flannel and not a great deal of substance, which may be apt enough – given its Johnsonian target – but not quite what the doctor ordered.
Until Jan 13. Tickets: 020 7478 0100; sohotheatre.com