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Daily Express

Comedy of ministers, millionaires and passports is a topical treat
Thursday February 1 2001
By Robert Gore Langton

It's a bit too soon and a bit too close to the bone for Peter Mandelson to take much pleasure in this political farce. But what joy it is to lap up this comic revenge on New Labour spin and the ghastliness of government by soundbite.

Alistair Beaton's play is bang on the money. Indeed, he's been burning the midnight oil to keep this show topical. Lines about millionaires buying passports are just part of the fun in a play set in a hotel on the eve of a Prime Minister's speech. The PM, incidentally, is known as DL - short for Divine Light.

Nigel Planer is a hoot as the dripping wet Cabinet minister panicking about crop of genetically modified hops that has caused the beer drinkers of Britain to grow bosoms. Sian Thomas is the doomed journalist ex-girlfriend of the Machiavellian evil lovingly portrayed by the great Henry Goodman. And then there's the PM's gag-writer - a hopelessly irrelevant Ben Elton-type played by Pearce Quigley - forever locked in the lavatory.

There have been worthier attacks on politicians by dramatists. But none, surely, has gone for the throat like this one. A painful must for anyone in government, a terrific cackle for the rest of us.

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Thursday February 1 2001
By Michael Billington

Timing is everything in theatre as in politics. And Alistair Beaton's very funny satire on the hidden panic that that underlies Labour's obsession with spin could hardly come at a choicer moment. Behind the play, however, lurks a larger point: that comedy is always at it is best when it feeds off current reality.

Beaton's setting is a seaside hotel on the eve of the prime minister's party conference speech. Eddie, his control freak press secretary, is hammering out the verbs uplift - "A job culture not a yob culture" - with a young speech writer when a succession of disasters erupt. Anti-capitalists are rioting in the streets. Environmentalists hijack the well-oiled conference. Worst of all a key minister confesses that this land has been used for secret trails on genetically modified hops. By accident they have found their way into the beer supply with the unfortunate side effect that male drinkers are developing female breasts.

The mammaries certainly linger on in the play's plotting. But Beaton's strength is that he anchors a fantastic scenario in a world of plausible detail. And what he captures particularly well is the press secretary's desire to keep control of escalating events.

At one point the deputy PM and transport boss is stuck on a train and seeks to escape angry commuters: at the same time the BBC is planning to lead news with a story of conference chaos. With Machiavellian skill Eddie decides it is better to shop the deputy PM than to allow activist greens to hog the bulletins.

Satire, of course, relies on a moral positive and Beaton's point is that Labour needs to put radical policies before presentation. Fair enough. But, in the second act, the laughter thins out to make room for the pot of message Beaton also never fully acknowledges that, in a media dominated world, all politicians parties are preoccupied with news management. But you feel he knows the backstage world of conference first hand and his image of Labour's hierarchy fighting like ferrets in a sack is one borne out by last week's shenanigans.

But the particular joy of Max Stafford-Clarke's production is Henry Goodman's Eddie. We know from his Shylock that Goodman can encompass tragedy. Here he reminds us that he is also a Master comedian. His particular gift is a vaudevillian precision: at one point he does a sexy swivel of his hips as if Eddie is a born performer. Even funnier is the sense of panic that lurks beneath the desire for control: to see Goodman dancing on a colleague's mobile phone to destroy an intrusive personal message is to see physical comic acting at its best.

Nigel Planer also gives a wonderful display as the confessional minister, Pearce Quigley hovering splendidly on the sidelines and Sian Thomas as a once famous Guardian columnist wittily represents the exiled conscience of the left. Beaton's play is not perfect. But it brings political rudeness and cheek back to theatre stifled by cautious conservatism.

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Daily Mail

Michael Coveney - at last night's first night
Thursday, February 1 2001

HOORAY for a political comedy that is actually funny. And rather sinister - and whose leading characters bears a weird resemblance to Alistair Campbell, the Prime Minister's Press secretary. Henry Goodman plays this chap, Eddie, as a self-obsessed spider at a hotel during the party conference.

The keynote speech must be written for 'Diddums' (the PM) but a scandal is emerging. Eddie's ex-wife, a journalist who lost her job on the Guardian - she hit the bottle, the drugs and the editor - is on to a story involving a crony chum of the PM. This hapless Life Peer, played with wonderful deadpan by Nigel Planer as a cadaver with floppy hair and slow limbs, reveals that genetically-modified beer (grown from hops on his family estate) is producing a strange side-effect on male drinkers all over Europe. They are growing large breasts. Understandably, this drives Eddie into a dance of rage and Henry Goodman explodes like a maniac before moving down the hotel corridor to confront his ex-wife (Sian Thomas).

We recover comic equilibrium with a return to the seat of power, mobile phones and the ingratiating search for phrases about a job culture, not a yob culture. Finally, the PM, or DL- the initials stand for Divine Light, or Dodgy Leader, or Dreadful Lightweight- speaks from the podium in a distorted echo of last year's party conference speech. He says the journalists who died in a hotel fire, inexplicably torched by dissidents, will not be forgotten. She had already been bought.

Beaton has taken his play into the realms of vicious satirical fantasy and I must say I was amazed, though I shouldn't have been - this writer has translated Gogol. Max Stafford-Clark's compelling production is brilliantly cast, with cleverly inflected performances all round that suggest a backroom political milieu rife with intrigue, nastiness and vicious hypocrisy. Surely this cannot bear any resemblance to the New Labour project of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alistair Campbell and Charlie Falconer?

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Evening Standard

Sizzling satire on Number 10
Thursday 1 February 2001
Nicholas de Jongh

POLITICAL satire was joyfully restored to the stage last night, when a Prime Minister, his methods and his Downing Street spokesman, were held up to ridicule and mockery. It was crystal-clear that though the Premier was identified only as "DL" and the spokesman as "Eddie" that Mr Blair and a devilish amalgam of Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson were the play's real targets. Will our Prime Minister ever be able to look the nation straight in the face again, now that this cult sincerity and priggishness has been so lethally sent up by his latest impersonator: Nigel Cooke's PM ogles us with the come-on of mock-modesty.

Feelgood's author, Alistair Beaton, who has already vented his spleen against politicians in Spitting Image, has cooked up a sizzling political face. It's true that Beaton's satire, written from an old Labour perspective, levels a hackneyed attack upon the Blair administration, accusing it of an obsession with presentation at the expense of policy, of media manipulation and suppressing all internal party dissent. Yet this witty lampoon, despite the farfetched resolving of its crisis, is driven by the force of a scandal that rings funny, familiar bells.

 

The scene is a hideously floral hotel room during a Labour Party conference, where the press supremo, Henry Goodman's Eddie, is pulling all the strings as if the Labour Carty were his puppet, Eddie is the play's comic focus. He's a fantastic intriguer in a hurry, the fixer who wants to be the controller, a foul-mouthed bully who knows all the secrets, but uses charm as his secret weapon. When a languid cabinet office minister admits that his secretly cultivated GM hops have ended up as a beer that produced breasts in some men and shrunken penises in others, Eddie's rage, panic and sarcasm are a joy to behold.

It takes too long for this scandal to be airborne, despite Max Stafford-Clark's swift, beautifully tuned production. But the play takes wing, with the PM's newly discovered young gag-writer and Eddie's lefty former wife, a finely scathing Sian Thomas, caught up in the frantic manipulations. Despite some farcical overkill, Feelgood scores sharp satirical points at the expense of Labour hypocrisy and double-dealing. Nigel Planer's silly-ass cabinet minister amuses, while Goodman's Eddie, all nervous vitality and spitting vituperation, is a razzle-dazzle comic triumph. A satirical treat to savour.

 

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Labour farce is a hoot whatever your persuasion
Thursday February 1 2001.
Charles Spencer

The Prime Minister and Alistair Campbell will, of course, be far too busy - though they might consider sending their lawyers - but now Peter Mandelson has some unexpected spare time on his hands he should pay an urgent visit to Hampstead.

Alistair Beaton's cracking new comedy is the first play successfully to nail the absurdity and the paranoia at the heart of the New Labour "project". It is an evening of riotous farce that produces great gales of mocking laughter (always the greatest danger to pompous politicians), but there is genuine anger here too.

I suspect that Beaton, a veteran scriptwriter whose credits include Spitting Image and Not the Nine O'clock News, is of the old Left persuasion, while this reviewer is quite a lot further to the Right.

But it doesn't matter a jot. It's the present Government, with its lunatic obsession with "presentation" and its terrifying lack of solid conviction, that is being lethally skewered, with infectious, malevolent glee. The action is set in a seaside hotel on the eve of the Labour leader's big conference appearance. A harassed policy wonk and the PM's press secretary are hard at work on his speech when they discover they have a crisis on their hands. Not only has a member of the Cabinet (one of the PM's old friends, parachuted into the Lords) been conducting secret GM crop trials on his land, bu the genetically modified ops have found their way into the beer. The result is that men are beginning to grow breasts.

 

As you will guess from such a description, the comedy here is often broad, but like all good farce-writers, Beaton pursues his theme with ruthless logic while also being generous with the jokes. Better still, he exposes the rottenness of the political process with the bitter bile of a latter-day Swift. Max Stafford-Clark's production undoubtedly makes you laugh, but it also makes you shiver, and it is blessed with a brilliantly compelling central performance from Henry Goodman as the PM's press secretary. In his foul-mouthed expletives, and his coiled, explosive anger, he is clearly based on Campbell. But there is a lot of Mandelson here too, for Goodman has a creepy deviousness, a touch of the night about him, that brilliantly recalls Blair's disgraced Machiavellian fixer.

The sight of this driven, hyperactive monster dictating the BBC's new schedule and ruthlessly shafting his colleagues is pure comic joy. If the play has a fault it is that the shift between farcical high-jinks and satirical indignation is often accompanied by an audible crashing of the dramatic gears. But you wouldn't want the comedy to lose its bracing anger, and Nigel Cooke's final delivery of the PM's carefully rehearsed speech devastatingly nails the bogus "spontaneity" and the odious fake sincerity of Tony Blair on the conference platform. There's outstanding support from Nigel Planer as the dim peer, dolefully revealing ever more damaging details of the scandal that could bring down the government; from Jeremy Swift as the speechwriter who finally decides he's had enough; from Sian Thomas as a crusading Left-wing journalist; and from Pearce Quigley as a delightfully nerdish sitcom writer who has been recruited to provide the PM's speech with a few funnies. Beaton once performed the same thankless task for Gordon Brown, and despite its satirical exaggerations and slightly creaky climactic melodrama, the piece has a satisfying whiff of authenticity.

It won't bring down the Government, of course, but anyone who sees this play will find it hard to take New Labour seriously again. And that's a start.

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