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THEATER: COMEDY-SATIRE

WHY LONDON IS TRASHING PRESIDENT BUSH? George W. Bush, Tony Blair and God appear - but not Saddam Hussein. Michael White introduces a new play with music about the war on terror

BUSH AND BLAIR MAKE THEIR DEBUT IN LONDON

It isn't widely known in the corridors of world power, no doubt for reasons of security, but later this month President Bush and Prime Minister Blair will make their vocal debut at the Birmingham Rep in a cheerful little number called "We're sending you a cluster-bomb for Jesus". Sadly, not the actual Bush and Blair, just close approximations in a singing/dancing/cursing play-with-music by the satirist Alistair Beaton and composer Richard Blackford. And whether the audience will leave the theatre grinning or crying is something the authors can't guarantee, although Beaton promises "a roller-coaster evening where you'll laugh, you'll be disturbed, and you might be very angry. As I was. Which is why I wrote it." Follow my Leader is, as you may have guessed, about the Iraq War, or, more broadly, the war on terror - insofar as it starts with events prefiguring 9/11 and embraces whatever happened the day before you see the piece. "We intend to keep things topical, so we'll be adding to it all the time," says Blackford who, on the day we spoke, had just completed a tango for Clare Short entitled "I am the conscience of the Party". Yes, as well as Bush and Blair, Ms Short appears - and God. But not Saddam.

Photo: Clare Short: In practice for her specially written tango.

"He did at first," says Beaton. "In fact we auditioned for Saddam lookalikes, and 40 or so turned up; but as the piece developed he just didn't fit into the structure, so he went. The lovely Cherie was there too, originally, but she also went. She was too glamorous for a show like this." Osama bin Laden does appear but he, Beaton fears, "may force some especially big updates on us if, as I suspect, Bush knows where he is and won't make his move until eight weeks before the presidential election. But that depends on how long the production keeps running." As things stand, Follow my Leader opens in Birmingham on 26 March, before moving on to Hampstead, before a West End transfer that isn't guaranteed but looks hopeful given that the play's backers include Raymond Gubbay and Michael Grade, in addition to the Birmingham Rep, Hampstead Theatre and the West End producer Lee Dean. Those sort of names add weight to what might otherwise seem a rather eccentric project. But then, the names of the authors have their own weight. Alistair Beaton, 57, has a track-record as a political satirist that stretches back through scripts for Spitting Image and Not the Nine O'Clock News to the infamously barbed Ratepayer's Iolanthe, co-written with Ned Sherrin in the 1980s and staged with funding from the GLC.  More recently he received the Evening Standard's Best Comedy Award for his 2001 West End hit Feelgood, a wickedly subversive farce about the world of party conferences and political spin that speaks with the authority of someone who began his career writing speeches for Gordon Brown. "Something I no longer do," says Beaton drily. Richard Blackford's world is somewhat different.

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