Reviewed by Franco Milazzo for Theatre and Tonic.
*Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in return for an honest review
With the fury of a thousand Sun headlines, Jonathan Pie returns to the stage with his latest show Heroes & Villains.
If there were medals for speaking truth to power, Pie would be walking around like a Russian general at the Moscow Victory Day Parade. The alter ego of Tom Walker is well known for his explosive rants while reporting from College Green with a political apoplexy about the issues of the day almost always focussed on the Conservative Party.
The premise for this latest outing is that Pie has become the face of a new campaign intended to get young men to participate more in democracy. “Get Your Vote Out For The Lads” is intended to steer them away from the unholy triumvirate of Laurence Fox, Jordan Petersen, and Andrew Tate and towards a ballot box. Three million 18-21 year olds will be going to the polls for the first time ever and, even if ultimately the choice is between “shit vs shite”, Pie wants to ensure that they have the right information to hand. To that end, he tries engaging them with rap (a failure) before hitting home in a reasonable manner with fact after fact.
It’s not too long, though, before Pie’s stock-in-trade rants come out. The nuclear mushroom cloud which appears on the screen just before he comes on stage is a knowing wink to what we are all really here for: a no holds barred attack on the perceived incompetence, corruption and brazen nature of the Tory government of the last fourteen years with Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Theresa May especially in the headlights.
Pie cleverly adds in several bits about other figures in the public eye. He goes full bore on the Royal Family, their law-bending, their £650m estate and especially King Charles’ “sausage fingers” and finds time to comment on the media circus around the sex scandals of Huw Edwards and Philip Scofield before giving us some deep cuts, trawling over forty years of political history. He excoriates John Major for his “nice guy” demeanour while having an affair with Edwina “mad egg c*nt” Currie, Margaret Thatcher is “pure evil directly from Satan’s anus” and Tony Blair was “Margaret Thatcher in a Moss Bros suit”.
He saves his best for last, swigging from water bottles while going all out to verbally eviscerate the current crop of Conservatives and their public school backgrounds (Eton is memorably described as “Hogwarts for c*nts”). There’s a theatrical bite to some of the rants but undeniably some real anger in there too. There’s something of a latter-day George Carlin in there (another man never scared to hide his views) with some of Bill Hicks’s sharpness thrown in.
The show ends with a nod to its title with Pie owning up to his own professional demeanours like his well-documented work for the UK branch of Russia Today. It turns into a mawkish fictional confession of his past and present “hypocrisy” which feels tagged on for effect and a world away from the hard hitting facts he bangs out for over an hour. Every hero is something of a villain he seems to say but it’s not quite time for Pie to hang up his cape just yet.
