Jonathan Pie at the Duke of York Theatre: Machine gun satire
Jonathan Pie is what you get when you splice Malcolm Tucker with Alan Partridge. The fictional BBC political correspondent, born almost a decade ago on YouTube, is performed by actor Tom Walker, who has now concluded his 2024 UK stand-up tour with 12 dates in the West End. It’s hard to believe he had any voice left after a total of 41 shows since January: Jonathan Pie doesn’t deliver his lines, he machine-guns them at the audience, pausing only for glugs of water.
What Jonathan Pie lacks in refinement, he makes up for in firepower. The character’s brand of political satire does not rely on obliqueness: you almost always know from the beginning who or what the next victim will be. This does not detract from the enjoyment of his tirades but makes them feel cathartic. He channels the anger on your behalf, says the unsayable, and you feel lighter as a result. Whether or not you belly laugh is immaterial: you are just relieved someone said it out loud for you.
After an intermission during which the glitterball stops and the lights dim, he’s back on the saddle, venomously spraying lines like: “You don’t expect me to live by my morals do you? He’s my son for God’s sake!”. No one is spared: not himself, nor the affluent lefties like him who go to church for the sake of their kids’ education, nor the Royal household, keen on charitable work but not on giving up their assets. Champagne socialists are now in the cross-hairs and what an exceedingly good killing spree that is.
The genius of this Jonathan Pie: Heroes and Villains political satire is that the vehemence of the attacks on both the right and on the left is equal. An hour goes by very quickly and you leave the theatre knowing that whoever will win the next general election will get the same treatment as the incumbents: no precision sniping from the rooftops, but full frontal, left to right assault rifle work.
There is no such thing as too much political satire. Tom Walker and his Jonathan Pie deserves credit for services to democracy and to our own sanity. Elegance can wait.