Music: Felix Hagan
Writers: Al Murray, Matt Forde and Sean Foley
Director: Sean Foley
The choreographers of corruptible caricature, the savage savants of satire, the latex lampooners of spotlit media mayhem lunacies are back in business. Forty years on from their Central TV Sunday 
peak-viewing schlock and phwoar rubber-themed anarchies, they’re on a Magnificent Seven Mission led by the pint-sized Tom Cruise. Puppets on a bling, extreme mannequins make-over for the Third Millenium: it’s all refreshingly offensive in the good old-fashioned way.
How to flesh out a disparate, often despicably bad-taste, desperate twenty-minute shotgun marriage cursed in Hell sketch-show format into a two-hour passage within this wooden O? Why duckies, get Sir Ken to set the scene. The very fabric of society is in peril. Symbolically represented by a well-past smell-date pair of underpants, it’s mini-me maverick Tom Cruise’s Mission Improbable to put together a team – Idiots Assemble, to Save The World. Scandalous, scurrilous, all in the very best iconoclastic bad taste, tilting at all and any hot-air ego-driven windmills, the last thing this show can be accused of is bias – they have a stab at near everyone. Oddly enough, Clarkson gets off with a passing reference. Perhaps even The Rep’s cavernous proscenium arch can’t accommodate his ego.
An affectionate homage to The Muppet Show’s Statler & Waldorf sees Presidents Putin and Xi lend a running commentary. Her late Majesty gets to let rip with a portrait-bursting Brian May We Will Rock You riff. The rest of the Buck-House mob gets it point-blank from both barrels. But surely a pin-eyed, coked-out Paddington Bear is beyond the pale? No prisoners will taken in the making of this show. Guest in the House, Jess Phillips MP, could hardly be allowed safe passage, but a fleeting cameo compared to the pugilistic Angela Rayner on fiery form.
The ingenious animation of character is of utter charm and wit. Upper torso caricatures are choreographed with elan and gliding brio. Perhaps not quite such dexterous application for the monstrousness personification viz Chucky/Exorcist’s Regan aka Suella Braverman – though thoroughly in character. To lend this production airs of classical Greek drama, drawing on Aristophanes’ anti-war political satire Lysistrata, where the women of Athens go on sex strike, might suggest ideas above its station. Until that is, come Part Two, as it were, a rollicking phalanx of giant phalli invades the stage. Why? Because they could and wanted to. Topical up to the minute, Nicola Sturgeon makes her curtain call with signature dignity. The Jabberwocky gangling Jacob Rees Mogg’s auditorium entrance is beyond bad taste and should come with a health warning. Perhaps the priapic Boris Johnson steals the show. He gets his dues in Part Two with a grotesque masquerade of swinging phalli of which the less spread the better.
Be it celebrity knuckle-headed narcissism, Royalty media regicide or pricking the politician pomposity bubble it begs the question – is this a world actually worth the saving? Better not let Greta Thunberg hear that…
Runs until: 11 March 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
You'll laugh like a drain doesn't
