In the 43 years since NewsRevue first made merry at present affairs – it’s now the world’s longest-running reside comedy present – had been present affairs ever earlier than in such a parlous state? The workforce, in different phrases, have lots to work with – and work it they do, on this high-energy, unrelenting hour of songs and sketches. One doubts the format has modified a jot in 4 a long time: its method (track/sketch, blackout, plinkety-plonk piano within the darkness, then repeat) suggests cheerful obliviousness to improvements on this planet of efficiency. And honest sufficient: the draw is the expertise, the jokes, and the new topicality, and NewsRevue 2022 classic delivers all of them.
The stage could also be small, and the wigs low cost. However the track and dance is deftly orchestrated, and the four-strong solid hurl themselves on the materials, which addresses a broad cross-section of the tales behind the latest headlines. You need stop-the-press? Right here’s a Biggest Showman medley hymning “the Tory shitshow”, and a sketch rendering the occasion’s management candidates as unappetising goodies in a range field. You need starting-to-feel-out-of-date? Right here’s a mutual appreciation duet sung by Chris Whitty (Edward Bourne) and Patrick Vallance (Charlie Keable). Elsewhere, the denizens of Londongrad recast their woes to the tune of Abba’s Cash Cash Cash, Ant and Dec current a cost-of-living disaster gameshow, and David Attenborough stokes the Queen’s erotic fireplace in probably the most unlikely method.
Forty minutes in, the rhythm can begin to really feel attritional. And the ideological even-handedness has a blandifying impact: Tory-teasing skits are balanced by squibs about Keir Starmer’s inadequacies; P&O bosses are mocked, however so too hanging prepare drivers. One may choose one’s satire to talk from a clearer (or any) ethical perspective of its personal. However at 10 o’clock on a Friday night time, within the venue that’s hosted NewsRevue for many of its 43 years, nobody however me appeared to thoughts. The house crowd cheered to the rafters as Keable’s Boris remixed Jailhouse Rock, Camille Hainsworth-Staples and Phoebe Coop despatched up Stepford Spouse America within the post-Roe v Wade period, and one other Edinburgh fringe run loomed. The federal government could also be tottering, however NewsRevue continues, on this patch no less than, to reign supreme.
On the Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh, 3–28 August.
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