3 – 8 July
Delivered by nine talented actors and three on-stage musicians, all wearing red ties, Tony! offers a breathless and entirely irreverent gallop through the life of our youngest Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Written by Harry Hill, with music and lyrics from Steve Brown, the emphasis is most certainly on humour. The songs are rude and the tunes are catchy. Politics and pantomime collide, and there is some inspired clowning, such as when Saddam Hussein appears as a replica of Groucho Marx, gleefully singing, ‘I never done anything wrong.’ The lampooning involves virtually all the key figures of the time, and nothing appears to be off limits, with John Smith’s heart attack, David Blunkett’s blindness and Princess Diana’s car crash all mined for laughs.
Getting his voice pretty much spot-on, Jack Whittle’s ever-smiling portrayal of a guitar-clutching Tony Blair neatly captures his rather desperate desire to be liked and to be hip. This Blair is a political naïf, whose chief ambition in life is to meet ‘Mick Jaggers.’ All the real politics is driven by a Svengali-like Peter Mandelson (Howard Samuels) who controls Blair in carrot-and-stick fashion, using an actual carrot and stick. That cartoonish, one-dimensional approach extends to all the other characters, with frequently very funny results. Particularly successful in this regard is Phil Sealey’s impatient, bad-tempered Gordon Brown, every angry utterance ending with a grotesquely exaggerated version of his familiar dropped jaw mannerism. Equally enjoyable is Emma Jay Thomas’s breathily seductive Princess Diana who, having died before the interval, makes a welcome ghostly return in the second half.
However the non-stop daftness does become a little wearing, as does the undifferentiated ridiculing of all and sundry. It might be overly pious to have hoped for a more balanced approach, but this show’s lumping together of all political leaders as ‘assholes’ seems rather too cynical and self-defeating. Yes, high office and egotism certainly go hand in hand, but not every Prime Minister or President is an utter monster.
Tony! aims to be undemanding entertainment, with just a dash of satirical commentary, and as such it is successful. It would surely be missing the point to complain of a lack of complex characterisation and carefully shaded argument, but I did leave the theatre feeling just a little short changed. It is perhaps something of a struggle to recall that during his first term of office Blair was hugely popular, having introduced a minimum wage, an increase spending on health and education, a strengthening of LGBT rights, and achieving the Good Friday Agreement. By his third term of office there had been the dodgy dossier and the Iraq war, and in most people’s eyes Blair had fallen far from grace. It could be argued that such a fall is the stuff of tragedy, not comedy. In the very last moments of Tony! there is an acknowledgement of this, and a distinct shift to a more sombre mood, albeit very briefly. We are invited to reflect that, as voters, we probably get the leaders we deserve. When Blair addresses the audience directly, accusing us of being complicit in his misdemeanours, there is a suspicion that, beneath all the tomfoolery, this show hides real anger as well. I would have liked a little more of that anger.
★★★☆☆ Mike Whitton, 4 July, 2023
Photo credit: Mark Senior
