The time has come to, as they say, bring back Blair. No, wait! In the form of a song-based theatrical satire. Ahead of Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera]’s run in Cardiff, Hari Berrow talks to the show’s co-writer, composer and comedian Steve Brown, about how the show came to be.
Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera], co-created by Steve Brown and Harry Hill, enjoyed a sold-out run at the Park Theatre in London – and rave reviews – ahead of touring the UK throughout summer and autumn. Following Tony Blair from birth to deathbed, the satirical comedy explores how some of the most controversial political decisions of recent history came to be. Brown is very keen to explain why it’s absolutely not a musical.
“Operas are not happy affairs. They generally concern themselves with great tragedy. It’s something that will always inevitably go wrong. So, we know, from the beginning of Macbeth, that it’s going to be a disaster. He becomes a victim of his own hubris. That’s both of them, actually, Blair and Macbeth…” Brown laughs. “I’m not comparing them.”
“We were quite adamant that we shouldn’t be lecturing an audience.”
Steve Brown
In a show about such a complex and Byronic anti-hero, Brown and Hill sometimes needed to flex on what was true-to-life in order to reflect what was true-to-character.
“Very few lives play out in a straight, linear way, and satisfy those narrative beats you want to strike. You always have to pick, choose, edit and, in some cases, twist the narrative. We imagine that he’s on his deathbed and – because he’s now a converted Catholic – has to make peace with his God before he goes. So, the priest goes back through his life with him, and we cherrypick the moments we think we can get most comedic value from.
“For example, we have a meeting between Blair and Gordon Brown when he goes to Oxford. Now, that never happened, but it’s a great callback that they meet and there is a similar dynamic. Blair takes the top bunk – ‘let me have it for a bit, and after a while I’ll take the lower bunk and you can take the top…’ and people immediately know that that is symbolic of what’s going to happen in government.”
As much as Brown wants his audience to laugh, he also wanted to offer them a nuanced view of one Britain’s most contentious politicians. “We were quite adamant that we shouldn’t be lecturing an audience. I think you are quite able at the end of it to think, ‘yeah, he’s terrible, he really stank,’ or ‘actually, you know, when you look at what we’ve got and what’s going on in the world now…’ There is room on both sides of the argument to watch the show, and that seems to me to be a healthy thing.”
Like all great satirists, Brown, more than anything else, is keen to make sure his audience goes away asking questions. Specifically, questions about the power imbalances that exist within our democracy. “In order to fix the problem, first you’ve got to recognize that you’ve got a problem. We have a problem. We allow these so-called leaders to go around and wreak havoc across the world. Great power corrupts greatly. It’s just inevitable.
“I think that, because Blair had done some good things, he thought, ‘If I do it, then it’s going to be a good thing because I’m a good person. I don’t believe that I’m morally misguided because I was trying to do the right thing.’ But we can always do the wrong thing. And if you have all that power at your disposal, it’s much bigger. If you’re driving your car and you have an accident, you crash into a lamppost; if you’re driving a bus and you fall asleep at the wheel, you kill your passengers.
“I’m not talking about revolution,” Brown smiles, “but I am talking about a revolution of thought.”
Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera], New Theatre, Cardiff, Wed 14-Sat 17 June.
Tickets: £22.50-£39. Info: here
words HARI BERROW
