Party Games!: This political satire is as tasteless and limp as lettuce

Jason Callender, Matthew Cottle and Natalie Dunne star – Craig Fuller

Boris Johnson is catnip to political satirists – for one thing, his buffoonish idiosyncrasy and outsized blather make it all too easy for them. That’s one reason, presumably, why Michael McManus has built his new political comedy around a distinctly Johnsonian creature gaining the keys to Number 10 following the 2026 election. A comedy about the government under Keir Starmer, or, if the imagination can stretch to another Tory win, Rishi Sunak, may be more pertinent but it almost certainly wouldn’t be so funny.

Except, Party Games! isn’t nearly funny enough. Our John Wagner, a tussle-haired chap with the chuffed air of a school boy given the keys to the school tuck shop, has found himself in Downing Street following the surprise victory of the breakaway One Nation party – a renegade group of centrist Conservatives co-fronted by an Angela Rayner-style socialist Lisa (Debra Stephenson). A hung parliament – “so we didn’t lose, but we also didn’t win?”, asks Matthew Cottle’s bewildered Wagner – necessitates a coalition with the SNP. A bigger problem is Seth – Wagner’s Red Bull-downing Machiavellian adviser who establishes himself as chief policy maker with the help of an eerily all-seeing data crunching AI software programme. Cue a manifesto that smuggles in selling off state schools and the NHS, politically disarming the House of Lords and possibly even overturning the monarchy. Meanwhile, out on the streets, Thames Water has all but collapsed and Russia and China appear to be doing something dodgy with the electricity supply.

McManus, who worked for both Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath (he also wrote the 2019 play Maggie & Ted), has enough insider knowledge to give the malfunctioning internal machinery of Downing Street a vaguely authentic air. Joanne Read’s pleasingly ebullient, brightly coloured production boasts good work too, in particularly from Natalie Dunne as Wagner’s slickly controlling wife Anne, and Jason Callender as Luke, his principled but outed chief of staff. Yet the plot dissolves as easily as tissue. None of the actions of these people make sense, because they are stuck in a storyline that consists largely of gags haphazardly strung together. The odd one or two has sting: a close to the knuckle gag has Wagner celebrating the Black and White Minstrels for having “really created diversity”. Mostly though the comedy is the stuff of stand-up filler. As for Cottle, he does what he can but Wagner is too mildly characterised to serve any meaningful satirical purpose.

Party Games! stands in a venerable line of political satire, including Yes Minister and The Thick Of It, that takes aim at elected politicians unsuited in almost every way to the job in hand. There’s a universality in this that never goes away. All the same, and for all its inbuilt amusement factor, Party Games! feels out of date. This is a pity – it’s a bold move on the part of Yvonne Arnaud to programme an original play and a fullish auditorium on press night suggests there is definitely local audience support for it. Alas Party Games!, to nod to a running gag, is as tasteless as lettuce.

Until May 11 and then on tour. Tickets: 01483 44 00 00; yvonne-arnaud.co.uk

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