Poet Elvis McGonagall begins his current show by complaining that just as he’d finished writing it about how much better things would be if the Tories went after 14 years, Sunak called an election and they’ve gone. If only he could have hung on for a few more months…
After taking us through some of the not-so-high-lights of his acting career, the rest of the show is mostly concerned with looking back on the last fourteen years in UK politics, from Cameron and Brexit, to Teresa May (“like Death in an Ingmar Bergman film”) to the “bus replacement Prime Minister”—one of the milder epithets, and one of the few pre-watershed ones, attached to Boris Johnson in an almost endless, impressive and very funny tirade of invective that earned a round of applause.
Our shortest reigning PM gets a suitably short mention, then of course he turns his attention to Sunak, plus “the milkshake martyr”, Nigel Farage. Starmer is discussed, but Elvis says he is “a satirist’s nightmare” as other than his father being a toolmaker, there’s not much to go on.
All this is linked seamlessly with prose as lyrical, polished and hard-hitting politically as any of the poems.
He also covers lockdown and Prince Andrew, then turns to the social media ‘influencer’—“a spiv with an Instagram account”—before a list of who has influenced him, which becomes quite moving.
In fact, there are serious moments in many of his poems that become sad, thoughtful or, more commonly, angry, but most of it is very funny—unless your sympathies lie with the previous government and its various leaders or with the divisive politics of Clacton’s new but largely absent MP.