UKIP! The Musical is winning praise at this year's Edinburgh Fringe and it has to be admitted that the songs are catchy in a foot tapping, sing along type of way. The strong cast carry the tunes well and the seventy minute show is guaranteed to encourage anyone who is contemptuous of UKIP, anyway, to feel even more superior to the Kippers after the show is over than they did before.
Had the show been presented last year it would have been much more topical, but since we seem to have left peak-kipper behind, UKIP! The Musical seems to be pushing very much at an open door.
The historical nature of the production becomes clear when we realise that the villain of the piece is not Nigel Farrage, who is presented here as an amiable buffoon, but his former flatmate, Godfrey Bloom, who is caricatured as almost a Martin Borman figure who pulls all the strings. The fact that Bloom was slung out of UKIP by Farage is not mentioned, probably because the piece was written before the recent bloodbath. To be really effective, a satire has to be topical, and this one just isn't.
Still, for all that the audience loved it. The all white, RADA trained cast, had the almost all white, middle class audience in what is probably pretty much the whitest and most middle class city in Europe come August time, feeling that a blow for diversity had been struck.
UKIP! The Musical plays at 3.10pm until the 29th August at Venue 53, the
Surgeons' Hall, Nicolson Street. Tickets are £11.00.
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And people actually paid £11 to see it, as Einstein once said, there are three forces that control the world, stupidity, fear and greed ;)
ReplyDeleteHiya, Marty... I rather suspect that eleven quid is not much of a muchness to the average Edinburgh Fringe follower.
ReplyDeleteThey crowd sourced the £10,000 needed to bring the show to Edinburgh and raised the money from just 66 people, by they way.