Pandemonium review: Armando Iannucci’s cod-literary Covid satire won’t thrill weary audiences

A platinum blonde wig has to do a lot of heavy lifting as Boris and co are lampooned in a comedy that’s as lumbering as a Joe Wicks workout

‘Pandemonium’ at Soho Theatre feels miserably ponderous and out of date (Photos by Marc Brenner)

Long before Armando Iannucci was the telly satirist behind squirm-inducingly accurate gems like The Thick of It and The Day Today, he was a postgrad student, dutifully ploughing his way through a thesis on 17th-century religious literature. He ditched the DPhil in favour of a comedy career. But now, his swotty side is back with a vengeance – and more’s the pity. His debut play Pandemonium is a Covid-era political satire that feels miserably ponderous and out of date, even without the cumbersome references to greats like Milton, Pope, and Shakespeare.

Boris Johnson is fatally easy to lampoon: a bloated blonde fish in a barrel, his floundering attempts to manage the pandemic pored over and parodied so incessantly that an original take would be next to impossible. Iannucci gives it a go by putting his ensemble in Puritan garb (think black hose and prim white collars) and getting them to use florid verse to chronicle Johnson’s misdeeds. It doesn’t work. It’s hard enough to make actual 400-year-old jokes land on stage (just look at all those actors fruitlessly thrusting their hips to flag up Shakespeare’s superannuated dick puns). But here, the rhyming couplets fall into an unhappy middle ground: not well-crafted enough to intrigue poetry fans, but certainly not sharp enough to rouse pandemic-weary modern audiences.

‘A lockdown project’: Paul Chahidi in ‘Pandemonium’ (Marc Brenner)

Director Patrick Marber presides over a production that’s got moments of joy and energy, without really coming up with a persuasive answer to the question of how to inject life into this odd beast, cumbersome as those “mermaids” that Victorian conmen would stitch together from the corpses of monkeys and fish.

Johnson is predictable here (a platinum-blonde wig has to do some serious heavy lifting). But some of the minor players cast their own weird kind of spell, especially on first entrance. “Muck Hemlock” is a bog creature writhing uncannily in a green onesie, incapable of managing the challenges of procurement without his circle of loaded human mates. “Nodding Doggies” is a puppyish presence, all enthusiasm no brains. And “Dominant Wrath” is a childish boxer, swinging futile punches. It’s just a shame the surreal weirdness isn’t taken further: heck, even a dance number or two would help dispel this play’s cod-literary dryness.

Pandemonium feels like a lockdown project, a distraction from the monstrous, horrifying waste of life and resources the past three years have brought. Leaden as underproved sourdough, lumbering as a Joe Wicks workout, it probably didn’t need a stage outing. But someone with Iannucci’s talents has earned the right to try something new, and his fans are sure to indulge this frustrated literature scholar’s folly.

Soho Theatre, until 13 January