Yes the “c” word, a CAD!  Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, in conjunction with the Watermill at Newbury, have brought us perfect and witty dramas like The Wipers Times  and Spike.  Here they adapt for the stage the 1938 satirical novel by Scotsman AG Macdonnell about a fictional and unscrupulous Conservative politician Edward Percival Fox-Ingleby, who builds a complete fiction about who he is and what he stands for. 

Although AG Macdonnell’s political satires never achieved sales beyond favourable critical reviews, there is a record in the theatre programme by assistant director, Elsa Strachan of someone he did impress.  “One person who did take notice, however was Josef Goebbels.  He misread the satirical nature of the book believing it to be a genuine account. He even used it as inspiration for German wartime propaganda against the English, writing in his journal: ‘I read a book by the Englishman (sic) Macdonnell, an unspeakably frivolous and cynical concoction that shows the English plutocrat without his mask. Simply horrifying’.” 

The frame for the play is that in the late 1930s, Fox-Ingleby (James Mack) in his stately home, is dictating his autobiography to Miss Constance Appleby (Rhiannon Neads) who is clacking away on an old fashioned typewriter.  Mr Collins (Mitesh Soni) is his librarian researcher but whose corrections are ignored as Fox-Ingleby spins the version that puts him in the most positive light.  Throughout his life story, James Mack plays Fox Ingleby and the other two actors are called upon to take every other part in a miracle of costume change and characterisation, especially from Rhiannon Neads for everybody from chorus girls to wife, from grandmother to American mistress.