The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson – Review - Northern Stage

The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson 

Northern Stage, Newcastle 
18th February, 2020



Written by Jonathan Maitland (author of the hit plays Dead Sheep and An Audience with Jimmy Savile), Will Barton is Boris Johnson, no really he is so believable looks and sounds the part without coming across as too much of a caricature. The smash hit play that sold out its London run has come to Northern Stage as part of a U.K. tour.

We open with Boris having an interview with Huw Edwards for the BBC in early 2016 ducking the question of if he was for leave or remain. After which we see the comedic version of the dinner with Michael Gove that changed history: the night in February 2016 when Boris Johnson decided to vote ‘leave’ and a nation’s future was sealed.

Here we see the ghosts of Prime ministers past including Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Tony Blair. Also at the meal fellow MP Michael Gove, the journalist Sarah Vine, Marina Wheeler and Evgeny Lebedev.

Everyone but Tony Blair is Team Leave and slowly but surely wear Boris down to voting leave. 
All the acting is top notch here and mannerisms are nailed. I love that they have localised jokes in here more than once, where Sunderland is truly the butt of the joke and the audience eat them all up.

Fast forward to post-Brexit Britain, 2029. For reasons that may be fact and/or fiction at the time of the performance, Boris, no longer in power, roams the political wilderness. It’s at this point we get what is obviously a rewritten joke in light of recent events the BBC Amazon news channel! This is cutting satire at its best.

Brexit has been a disaster and new PM Dominic Raab, two a’s and a b, is struggling, a new strategy is a foot, could it be time to re-enter the EU?  There are lots of twists here, one of them being what has happened to Michael Gove?  This is one of the funniest bits of the play and had the audience in stitches.

It loses pace somewhere in the middle of the second act, however it picks up near the end and we have yet another jaw dropping twist at the end. I thoroughly enjoyed this from start to finish, but I’m not so sure ardent Leavers or Boris fans would feel the same. There were a few gasps in the audience, especially in the second act and I'm sure this was from the leavers in the audience.

Playing at Northern Stage 19.30 every night from the 18th February to 22nd February 2020, with an extra afternoon showing on Saturday at 14.00

*photo credit Pamela Raith

Frank Cromartie Murphy