In the Club

Published Friday 3 August 2007 at 12:50 by Alistair Smith

Richard Bean’s latest - a “political sex farce” set in a bumbling British MEP’s plush Strasbourg hotel room - is by no means a subtle beast.

It crams into two hours practically every possible cliche of the genre. Indeed, at times it feels as if someone gave the playwright a list of props which he had to incorporate and the rest was structured around that.

So we have pink fluffy handcuffs, a matching pink dildo, twiglets, an archbishop’s prosthetic leg, a chilled glass of water which the MEP has been dipping his testicles in to keep up his sperm count, and a manual sex aid - a wanking hand, in common parlance - which is strangely flammable.

It’s all undeniably silly, but the pace is quick enough and the performances strong enough to keep all the balls in the air, so to speak. James Fleet, as the charming but incompetent MEP Philip Wardrobe, struggling to keep his political ambitions alive and an appointment to impregnate his girlfriend, is perfectly cast. He is given excellent comic support, in particular by Richard Moore as Eddie, the bigoted but strangely likeable UKIP MEP, who utters the unforgettable line: “Stalin was a fascist and a mass murderer, but at least he weren’t a poof.”

It is beautifully delivered in Eddie’s broad Yorkshire brogue, but was maybe a little too much for this polite Hampstead audience, who greeted it with silence and a few stifled laughs.

I’m sure this play will find its critics - it is unashamedly low brow - but for me, it was the most and loudest I’ve laughed in the theatre for a long time, and that can’t be a bad thing.