Pandemonium by Armando Iannucci sold out all performances even before press night. That speaks not only to the satiric reputation of the writer but also to the enthusiasm of audiences for something to laugh at after the appalling COVID years.
Yet the humour of this romp through the chaos of government during the pandemic is superficially light and generally silly. A very fine cast, dressed as the Shakespearian characters The Pandemonium Players, mockingly play various contemporary British public figures.
There is Boris Johnson (Paul Chahidi), or, as he sometimes calls himself, Orbis (God). He tells us he is too busy writing a book and being a father to another baby to pay much attention to the dangers of the virus.
Still, he has a helper he describes at one point as “a leprechaun” called Richies Sooner, and there is an appearance from someone in a general’s uniform with tough plans called Suela Bovver-Boy.
Throughout the show, there are visits from Michael Go, a name derived from the fact that “everyone wants him to go.”
The one figure who gets a bit more attention is Matt Hemlock (Amalia Vitale), who arises in a green lizard-like suit from an imagined pit of slime. His distraction is Gina Coagullatio.
When the fatal results of incompetence with the pandemic prompt public anger, other figures walk across the stage angrily calling him names, including we are told the Dean of St. Paul’s supposedly yelling “wanker” at him.
There are investigations of Downing Street parties by “Cressida Dick Joke” and the mumbling figure Sue Gray in a huge medieval monk’s habit. We are told there will be an inquiry sometime in the future “to take a long time... to never get to the bottom of this.”
The show is little more than a knockabout end-of-year school entertainment, that strangely has no satiric teeth beyond making up playground names for public figures. It offers no insight into their behaviour beyond stupidity, lacks any kind of context for the horror that enveloped the UK and, despite the lively, fluent performance of a fine cast, feels overlong at ninety minutes' running time.