By Joyce McMillan
A star is a star is a star; and as soon as Rik Mayall struts and slithers on to the stage of Edinburgh's giant Playhouse, to take complete control of the evening without even the help of a microphone, you know that you are in the presence of one of the most gifted comedy stars of our time. The part Mayall was born to play, of course, is that of Alan B'stard, the famously amoral politician whose single-minded greed, lust and raging ambition - and absolute lack of human decency - have made him one of the great comedy figures of the age since his first television appearance in 1987. This inspired new stage version of the story, from original writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, shows the slimy B'stard now ensconced in No 9 Downing Street, after slithering across the floor of the house sometime during the 1990s to become the eminence grise - or greasy - behind the Blair project.
To say that the content of the play is rude and radical is to understate the case by a long mile. As Mayall has predicted, the show comes as a sharp reminder of just how mealy-mouthed broadcast satire has become.
It presents Tony Blair - crated up in a box after a faked kidnapping - as a babbling Bambi-figure entirely in B'stard's thrall, while the evil Alan stacks up an eye-popping private fortune by trafficking sex-workers from eastern Europe, and runs Western policy with the help of frequent helicopter visits from a hot-to-trot Condoleezza Rice, who has messed up by destroying Iraq's oil industry during the war and is therefore desperate for an excuse to invade and grab some other oil-rich country.
Nothing is sacred, as Marks and Gran rampage their way across the current political scene; from suicide bombers to His Holiness the Pope, everything is grist to their comedy mill, without a shred of good taste in sight. "Seduce Gordon Brown?" wails B'stard's vampish ex-wife. "But he's only got one eye!" "Well, that's one more than Blunkett and you did it with him!" snaps B'stard.
There's slightly more to this piece of vintage B'stard, though, than a few good one-liners, and a truckload of filthy innuendo. In the first place, the show belongs firmly in an ancient English tradition of obscene and scatological satire against those in power. B'stard is a grotesque whose antecedents range from Mr Punch, through Gillray cartoons, to the leering gargoyles and demons of the great English cathedrals. It speaks volumes for Mayall's skill as a performer that he can evoke that grotesquery in a conventional-looking stage show as vividly as he did on screen.
And second, The New Statesman in 2006 has some sharp and even profound things to say about the fate of government in our times, when the principles that attracted politicians to their trade always seem to be overwhelmed, within half a decade or so, by the pressures of a global system driven by greed and sleaze. B'stard is like the demon in the machine, the outward and fleshy expression of the evil that politicians just can't help doing, as power tightens its grip on them. Mayall plays him brilliantly, in this deft production by Jennie Darnell, smartly delivered by an eight-strong cast, and although the plot flags a little towards the end, he gives the audience one hell of a night at the theatre, adult entertainment in the true sense of the word.