FOUR STARS

 

Adorning a West End cloaked in festive finery at present is a sharply satirical and extremely funny new play concerning a group of people for whom it is — or at any rate was — Christmas every day of the week.

My reference is to Members of Parliament and their neighbours in the Upper House at Westminster whose lavish misuse of taxpayer-funded expenses was exposed four years ago in a series of articles in The Daily Telegraph that can be said truly to have shocked the nation.

The claim of Tory grandee Sir Peter Viggers for the £1,645 cost of a floating duck house at his Hampshire home — at once outrageous and comically unlikely — appeared an eloquent para-digm of the whole sorry affair.

Writers Dan Patterson and Colin Swash — their satirical teeth sharpened respectively by work on Mock the Week and Have I Got News for You — take cue from this for the title of their exceptionally well-crafted farce.

The play might easily have been called, in the light of other bizarre claims made by our grasping politicians, The Glitter Toilet Seat (John Reid), The Horse Manure (David Heathcote-Amory), The Elephant Lamps (Michael Gove) or The Massage Chair (Shahid Malik).

All these items figure in the action (the last to wonderfully funny, liquid-spouting effect), having been acquired for his well-appointed home (design-er Lez Brotherston) by the Labour MP Robert Houston, who is presented in relishable comic style, and in somewhat Anthony Blair mode, by the excellent Ben Miller.

The luxury here has all been supplied courtesy of the taxpayer; ditto the champagne which Houston consumes by the magnum with his wife as they discuss his coming defec-tion to the Tories, a cynical move that takes account of a likely imminent shift in power.

Smoothly upper-crust Felicity (Nancy Carroll) is already with ‘Dave’ and team in spirit, one feels, so contemptuously does she speak of the meagre perquisites (expenses apart!) of life in Labour.

Eruption of the expenses scandal, though, threatens to derail the plan. When Tory big-wig Sir Norman Cavendish (Simon Shepherd) arrives to assess how squeaky clean, or otherwise, Houston is in the matter, there need to be some very sharp adjustments to the decor of house and garden.

Another major problem is posed by Houston’s taxpayer-funded London flat — home not to him, as it should be, but to the Houstons’ feckless son Seb (James Musgrave).

Thither the action moves in the second half, to a property garishly daubed with Goth graffiti and possessing an upstairs, sound-proofed chamber wherein Seb’s girlfriend Holly (Diana Vickers) practises acupuncture and more arcane alternative activities, some of which appeal to Sir Norman’s more — shall we say? — infantile side.

This is fun, fast and filthy. Directed by Terry Johnson, the play is highly recommended.

 

Vaudeville Theatre, London
Until March 29
Tickets: 0844 412 4663   nimaxtheatres.com