Writer: Rosie Holt (additional material by Stewart Lee)
Director: Daniel Clarkson
Heading for the Edinburgh Festival in a couple of months’ time, Rosie Holt’s 70-minute satire Churchill’s Urinal, playing at the King’s Head Theatre, takes issue with stone – or in this case ceramic – deification of great men as a new female chancellor must contend with the presence of a stained old urinal once used by Winston Churchill in her private Treasury bathroom. Taking swipes at the current government with plenty of topical references to an unstable political situation, this gathering farce takes Britain to crisis point while eventually advocating for greater moderation and a forward-looking political life.
Very definitely not based on Rachel Reeves, a pre-performance announcement insists this is a quite different first female Chancellor, giving Holt greater freedom to explore the extremes of a very silly situation that takes on a force of its own. Balancing her first week in the job while fighting off smarmy attendants to the Prime Minister, a spiralling assistant with deep anxiety and a bitter, philosophising ex-husband, this Chancellor endures a bruising 35-hours in public life when she is perceived to be erasing Britain’s greatest monument.
There is lots to admire in Holt’s play, largely a one-woman show with additional material by Stewart Lee, responding to the of-the-moment crisis in the Labour Party with some jibes about the Council Elections and leadership challenges that fit seamlessly into a more feminist show about the dominance of male power as she discovers that “the world and its toilets belong to men.” And audience members are left to draw their own associations between the triviality of the subject matter and the behaviour of the current government as the scenario builds quickly from a newspaper headline, to abusive social media commentary and rapidly to the presence of a physical mob baying for blood… or a pee-stained toilet allegedly used by Churchill.
The story is ridiculous and soon veers off-piste in the second half when the Chancellor is trapped in her room with said urinal, which now speaks to her with the face and voice of Churchill, creating a surrealist slant that adds little to the overall purpose of the show. Holt’s writing is at its strongest when mocking the Establishment or in moments of credible silliness, such as the replacement talking super toilet voiced by an AI John Nettles and the Chancellor’s political interview on Teams, seen from only one side, where she is continually interrupted by the absent journalist and unable to say anything at all. These shrewd observations about the incoherence of contemporary debate are enhanced by the bland statements from other leading politicians wading in unnecessarily to condemn or endorse.
Holt’s performance is excellent, fully drawing the audience into this Westminster world and its many unseen but richly drawn characters, while the proposition that Britain obsesses with preserving the past while forgetting to embrace the future is true state-of-the-nation stuff. But some of the jokes and story points are too predictable, and as the show slips into a more fantastical direction when Churchill appears, it, like the Chancellor, rather loses its grip.
Runs until 6 June 2026 and then at Edinburgh Fringe
