As the title might suggest, Richard Bean’s riotous new play has set its sights on a panoramic view of contemporary society, mostly venal. During the course of its three-hour running time, Bean satirises the press (in all its varieties); the police force; politicians; spin doctors; dim sportsmen; the Royal Family; the clergy; and, as if for a bonus award, the audience who would willingly pay up to £50 for a top-price ticket to watch themselves and their peers being mocked. As this might suggest, Bean’s satire is scattershot and his play is extremely messy and sprawling, often feeling like a first draft of something more nuanced and controlled. Yet for laughs per minute, there’s nothing to touch it in London at the moment.
The chief focus of its invective is a lowbrow red-top paper, The Free Press, which boasts gleefully about its page 7 girls and luridly sensationalist headlines; similarities with any real newspapers are, of course, entirely intentional. The paper is run by the sweary, old-school Wilson Tikkel (Robert Glenister) but the real power behind the throne is the fiercely ambitious news editor Paige Britain (Billie Piper), whose glamorous exterior is matched only by a willingness to do anything when it comes to getting the top stories, much to the delight of the nefarious proprietor, Paschal O’Leary (Dermot Crowley). If this means getting into bed – literally rather than metaphorically – with the pompous Conservative leader Jonathan Whey (Rupert Vansittart) or the dashing assistant commissioner Donald ‘Ding Dong’ Doyle Davidson (Oliver Chris), so be it. And then there’s a new dodge involving accessing people’s voicemail…
Condemning a new play for being too ambitious might seem harsh, but the problem here is that Bean has simply taken aim at too many targets and hoped that his shots hit home. Sometimes, as with the hysterically funny sub-plot involving the clueless Met commissioner Sully Kassam (a show-stealing Aaron Neil), who solemnly intones ‘The one thing I don’t have is a clue’, the tangential nature of the satire doesn’t matter because the diversions are so entertaining. Others, as with a half-hearted look at the descent into anorexia of Stella Stone (Kellie Shirley), a page 7 girl, or a subplot about the Queen playing drums with the Hitler Youth, feel as if Bean has had a good or provocative idea that he has crammed into the main storyline, resulting in its not being given enough attention. One wonders if the undoubtedly topical nature of Great Britain – it was rehearsed in secret during the phone hacking trials, and opened immediately after their verdicts – ended up being more of a curse than a blessing, so on-the-nose do several references and characters feel. (The Rebekah Brooks stand-in, Virginia White (Jo Dockery) barely features, possibly as a result of legal pressure.)
And yet. And yet. Nicholas Hytner directs the whole shebang with enormous energy and style, making use of often hilarious inter-scene video projections that clarify and illuminate the action, and marshals a superb cast, who give it their all. Piper, in particular, plays Paige with a mixture of charm and ruthlessness so well that it seems incredible to think that she was once best known for being a ‘teen pop sensation’ and married to Chris Evans. If it’s a minor shame that Oliver Chris – the scene-stealer in Bean’s earlier hit One Man, Two Guvnors – is stuck with a role that doesn’t make enough of his capacity for deadpan humour, then at least he’s typically excellent, as are Crowley, Glenister and a witty Kiruna Stamell as a solicitor with dwarfism who doesn’t let her size get in the way of her ambition.
I don’t know if Bean’s play is going to be rewritten at any point during its run (it transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in September), but it would benefit enormously from a sympathetic edit to get its length down; certainly, by the final half hour, things are beginning to drag. However, if all you’re after is a riotously entertaining evening – albeit one where some of the near-the-knuckle jokes draw gasps of shock rather than laughter – then Great Britain makes for a splendid night out.
Great Britain at the National Theatre, London, until 23rd August 2014. For more information and tickets visit the website.
