by Peter Callaghan

Gaffe-prone MP with unruly blonde mop

Stabs friends in the front and aims for the top

Love him or loathe him, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is, was and forever will be front page news. From overcoming the odds by defeating Ken Livingstone in the 2008 London mayoral race and like The Pied Piper of Hamelin luring the UK out of the EU with a campaign based upon bent bananas to underscoring his oddity by clotheslining a ten-year-old schoolboy during a trade mission to Japan and getting stuck on a zip line while celebrating Team GB’s first Olympic gold at the 2012 Olympics, The Man Who Would Be King who Eddie Mair famously described as “a nasty piece of work” is an open goal for satire which even Stuart Pearce couldn’t miss.

And that’s before you factor in his bicycle crash of an interview with the razor sharp Mair during which Boris admitted that he fabricated quotes when working for The Times, failed to deny that he lied to Michael Howard about an extramarital affair and jokingly condoned the use of force to obtain a journalist’s phone number. The problem with Boris: World King however is that writer Tom Crawshaw and director Yaz Al-Shaater who re-worked the show to incorporate Brexit and All That Jazz have crafted a show which is too much like it’s protagonist: full of energy and one-liners, but utterly shambolic. Or as King of The Scottish Play more eloquently put it: “Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, / And falls on th’ other.”

Take nothing away from David Benson though who nails BoJo’s carefully constructed but seemingly innocent buffoonery to a tee (though his voice, at times, teeters on the brink of an overexcited Gyles Brandreth with a nine-letter word in Dictionary Corner). Whether it be flirting with female audience members whom he woos with the offer of a you-scratch-my-back-or-I’ll-scratch-your-eyes-out business card or whether it be engaging in “whiff-waff” (Boris-speak for table tennis which he erroneously described as a Victorian English invention at the hand-over ceremony of the Beijing Olympics), Benson rises to the challenge with aplomb.

As does the Debbie Mcgee to his Paul Daniels Joanna Bending who plays a string of uncomplaining character parts including a French floozy and a cockney geezer at the drop of Boris’s pants – which is the state of undress our hapless protagonist finds himself in at the end of this hour-long hoot as he gazes into his Simon Callow-voiced crystal ball and finds that “mea culpa, mea culpa” he holds the power to press the big red button in not Have I Got News For You but The White House. Not bad for man who once quipped: “My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.”

Peter Callaghan
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