Here in England it’s pantomime season, that high-camp remnant of medieval festivity, where once a year the world is turned upside down. Liberty trumps propriety: men get to play women, women get to play men, audiences mess with the actors, actors mess with the play, and misrule briefly blows a raspberry at authority.
Enter Armando Iannucci, the swami of contemporary British satire, whose lampoon Pandemonium turns pantomime’s holiday humor into a gleeful pimp-slapping of the Tory Cabinet. (Especially its former buffoon-in-chief, Boris Johnson.) In Iannucci’s rambunctious cartoon, which began as a mock epic poem during the unbearable holiday of the coronavirus, the motley crew who gave us the mess of Brexit and the mayhem of lockdown are conjured up as a confederacy of infighting dunces suffering mightily under delusions of adequacy.
In the poem, Iannucci leavened his disgust with cod iambics. The stage spoof, which parodies Shakespearean historical-epic style—the soi-disant Pandemonium Players are in Elizabethan mufti—allows Iannucci to play the same ironic game but with more slapstick gusto. As the paying customers take their seats, they face Anisha Fields’s backcloth of a behemoth Grim Reaper looming over Albion (white land), with lizards and snakes lurking at the edges. A scenic foreshadowing of the reptilian pols to follow. “We’ll show you monsters and heroes, truth and lies, / Who gave their all and who spaffed up supplies,” the Players announce, admitting in rhyme the hostile sharpshooter’s ambition to kick ass and take names.
To start, the bald Narrator (the hardworking Paul Chahidi) surveys the parlous state of England and finds it “in lamentation locked.” Which leader, he asks in a comic echo of Shakespeare’s Richard II, might “polish this accursed turd / This septic isle?” On that sour note, to the sound of howling wind and ominous music, a mop of ruffled blond hair—a sort of crazy crown—dangles down from the bridge. The bald Chahidi puts on the wig. At a stroke, the dithering demi-god, known here as Orbis Rex—an anagram of Boris, whose stated childhood ambition was to be “World King”—is before us in all his “charismatic gas.” It’s a good joke, but the stage picture is more than a sight gag.
In his poem, Iannucci calls Johnson “a void yet filled.” In the play, it’s Rex’s number two, Richie Sooner (Rishi Sunak, latterly chancellor of the Exchequer and current prime minister: net worth, about $800 million), who disses him as “a compacted nothing.” The slowly descending towheaded toupee—a sort of animated emptiness— incarnates Johnson’s vacancy. He’s an absence in motion. Underneath his flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character. “I do not and have never lied. What I do is explore the thousand other / Exciting ways a fact can go,” Rex says at one point.
Pandemonium turns pantomime’s holiday humor into a gleeful pimp-slapping of the Tory Cabinet.
On the vexed issue of whether to Leave or to Remain in the European Union, for instance, Johnson can’t make up his mind, skittering from one side of the stage to the other with flags from both the U.K. and E.U. “To be in, or not to be in, that is the question,” he says. Iannucci treats Johnson like a piñata of persiflage, whacking him at every turn to spew out his chicanery.
On the surprise referendum win, referring to Leave’s false claim that the U.K. sent $440 million a week to the E.U., Iannucci kneecaps Johnson by having Rex say, “Well, turns out I needn’t have made such a fuss / You just put lies on the side of a bus.” The burlesque of Johnson’s rise and fall from power includes almost dying from the coronavirus, which he once called “nature’s way of dealing with old people.” The lampoon is a stick-figure drawing of Johnson’s vainglory, his vacillation, and, as he lay bedridden in an N.H.S. hospital bed, the jostling for power within Johnson’s Cabinet—piranhas swarming over a piece of almost-dead meat.
Iannucci is a virtuoso of vitriol. (He wrote and directed The Thick of It, the scabrous TV satire about the inner workings of the British government.) In his hands, Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, becomes Suella Bovverboy, whom he lets choke on the vomit of her loutish verbatim words: homelessness is a “lifestyle choice.” Michael Gove is Michael Go because “everyone wants him to go, but he has never gone.” Liz Truss, who nearly tanked the British economy in her 49 days as prime minister, is mocked as Less Trust. Dominic Raab, briefly deputy prime minister while Johnson was in hospital, is Dominant Wraath, “a day-long shout on legs.”
In his political outrage, Iannucci can’t see a belt without hitting below it. The person who gets a full satiric wallop, a slimeball who rises onto the stage from the ooze in a green bodysuit, is the health secretary, Matt Hemlock (Matt Hancock), who doled out pandemic-related government contracts to his “friends” and cost the taxpayer $19 billion by procuring defective personal protective equipment, only to resign for breaking social-distancing rules, after being caught on CCTV cheating on his wife, snogging his aide in an alleyway. The aide’s real name is Gina Coladangelo, but Iannucci can’t resist mischievously renaming her Coagullatio. The telltale CCTV image, what became known “arsegrab-gate” in some quarters of Fleet Street, is held aloft by the Players.
But the funniest indictment of Hancock’s shamelessness comes as he and his inamorata wallow in the ooze talking of being reborn by their love. “Roll out the new Matt … Matt Point Two, ” Coagullatio says. A passerby shouts, “You broke my family.” To which Hemlock shoots back, “Others would disagree,” refusing humiliation. The insults from the public keep coming—“You prick” … “You dickhead”—each one parried by Hemlock’s defensive stupidities. The best of the numerous billingsgates dumped on his head is a withering salvo delivered with hilarious conviction by Debra Gillett, “You massive fanny!”
Iannucci is a virtuoso of vitriol.
Ridicule is a great pesticide, but satire wants a killing. That lethal punch on the nose, which breaks the bone in the brain. The exhilaration is annihilation. At its finale, Iannucci’s capriccio finally tips from sneering to savage, from a gumming to a killing. Having cursed Hemlock elsewhere in the show—“I’d like to incinerate you, you fucking plague-pit!”—Iannucci consigns the whole cast of clowns to hell, a visual sleight of hand well managed by director Patrick Marber, who revs up the sputtering fun machine until the characters bleed. In slow motion, harried by figures with trident spears, they rise in their fiery furnace screaming, brawling, tormented, some even upside down. The sight of this punishment brings deep, satisfying emotional release. That’s the thing about cruelty in comedy. Without a killing, no feast.
In feudal communities, medieval festivals worked as a social safety valve, allowing the lower orders to let off steam and return pacified to the status quo ante. Pandemonium nudges people in another direction. In the play’s penultimate beat, before the lampoon returns to its Elizabethan template and dances a courtly envoi, the Pandemonium Players let the mask of mockery drop and talk straight with the audience, an emotional volte-face that reminds us that satire’s fight is against apathy and not just the booboisie.
They are still in charge,
Guarded by their friends;
And so it rests with you,
As to how this story ends.
With the British general election just 12 months away, Iannucci suggests another antidote to the Tory clown-car crash. Voting, not vilification, is a chance for the citizens, and not the satirists, to have the last laugh.
Pandemonium is on at the Soho Theatre in London until January 13, 2024
John Lahr is a Columnist at AIR MAIL and the first critic to win a Tony Award, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty
