Tony! Park Theatre.

Harry Hill and Steve Brown’s satire on the Blair years has some watchable moments but feels two decades out of date.

8 June 2022

A tube strike caused me to arrive with a couple of minutes delay on my visit to the Park Theatre’s intermittently funny production of Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera.

Twenty minutes into the performance I forgave my own minor tardiness because this show, at least in the first half, is basically two decades late on arrival.

In fact, so retro is the show’s subject matter, that I found myself interval-googling to check if the show was actually a revival of something from the noughties. Apparently, it is brand new for 2022, although I am tempted to think some of the jokes have been inspired by a hurried re-watching of Spitting Image, circa 2005.

Actually, it is not that it is bad. In fact, there is a fair amount to enjoy for anyone over 35, and hence presumably capable of remembering the ins and outs of the Blair era. Anyone else will need the New Labour Wikipedia page on hand to decipher who everyone is.

Or you could just give up on the narrative and enjoy Tony! for the patchy gags, the so-so visual humour, or the songs, a few of which are pretty good.

The show opens with the supine and shrouded shape of a recently deceased Tony Blair facing the audience on a mortuary slab. You get the feeling the writers, Harry Hill and Steve Brown, are not entirely unhappy about his fictional demise. Suffice to say that if you are one of our former PM’s few remaining fans then this probably is not the show for you.

Resurrected by a Greek Chorus of sharply suited New Labour cabinet members, the eponymous Tony, assisted by ‘Mandy’ Mandelson and ‘Prezza’ Prescott (among others you may struggle to recall) looks back on the highs and lows of his political career.

Cue a first half which provides a sporadically funny musical excursion around Blair’s formative years, university studies and political awakening. His encounter with a vampy Cherie (engagingly played by Holly Sumpton channelling Cilla Black) and the smile-challenged Gordon Brown stand out, but otherwise as one of the characters remarks, “It’s all a bit heavy handed”.

Harry Hill and Steve Brown write Blair as the stock horror-figure beloved by Old Labour and bitter Tory types – a cynical and directionless ingénue whose emergence as Mandy’s political puppet owed everything to a grin and nothing to conviction. I am not arguing, just suggesting the writers might have found something better than twenty-year-old Private Eye reprints as inspiration.

Plays generally leave a big question hanging over the plot when the show breaks for an interval.

The question you will need to ponder over your half-time G&T with this show has nothing to do with the narrative, and everything to do with the writers’ motivation. Specifically, why bother ridiculing a figure who is so diminished as a public persona as to be beyond satire? It all seems, if not exactly pointless, then certainly somewhat redundant. Talk about kicking a corpse.

That question is at least partly addressed in what that ensemble explains is the ‘serious bit’ in the second half. The argument seems to be that it is important to recognise how Blair’s deceit and dishonesty lead directly to the cynicism and populism currently personified by Trump. Personally, I think you could make exactly the same argument about Nixon and Watergate, and anyway, there is more to it than that.

The performances are pretty good. Charlie Baker looks and sounds nothing like Blair but sings well and gets the politico’s grimace-like grin just right. Howards Samuels keeps Mandy’s camp-factor just a notch below screaming queen and is hilarious. Rosie Strobel does a great turn as a hard-drinking Prezza.

The one unquestionable success of the show was the final song “The whole wide world is run by assholes”. Aside from being something we can all agree on it is very hummable.

In sum, if your vitriolic hate of Tony B is undimmed by maturity or age and you find banging on about the illegal Iraq war comforting to the soul, you will probably enjoy the retro ‘best hits’ kind of vibe to the show.

If you moved on in, say 2010, and you prefer your satire a little more al dente and up-to-date, you may struggle. Go see it and make your own mind up.

BOOK I HARRY HILL
COMPOSER & LYRICS I STEVE BROWN
DIRECTOR I PETER ROWE 
SET & COSTUME DESIGNER I LIBBY WATSON 
MUSICAL DIRECTOR I OLI JACKSON
LIGHTING DESIGNER I MARK DYMOCK

CHARLIE BAKER I TONY BLAIR
KAYE BROWN I ROBIN COOK / ENSEMBLE
MARISA HARRIS I ENSEMBLE / UNDERSTUDY
MARTIN JOHNSTON I NEIL KINNOCK / ENSEMBLE
HOWARD SAMUELS I PETER MANDELSON / ENSEMBLE
ROSIE STROBEL I JOHN PRESCOTT / ENSEMBLE
HOLLY SUMPTON I CHERIE BLAIR / ENSEMBLE
MADISON SWAN I PRINCESS DIANA / ENSEMBLE
GARY TRAINOR I GORDON BROWN / ENSEMBLE

Charlie Baker, Kaye Brown, Marisa Harris, Martin Johnson, Howard Samuels, Rosie Strobel, Holly Sumpton, Madison Swan, Gary Trainor, Harry Hill, Steve Brown, Peter Rowe, Libby Watson, Oli Jackson, Mark Dymock

Duration: 2 hours 10 minutes. One interval.

Full Disclosure: I paid full box-office price for the ticket.