Ben Miller is to play a dodgy politician in a new West End play that turns the MPs’ expenses scandal into theatrical farce.
The Duck House, by comedy writers Dan Patterson and Colin Swash, has a cast that includes Evening Standard Theatre Awards winner Nancy Carroll and X Factor semi-finalist Diana Vickers as the family of Miller’s unprincipled backbencher Robert Houston.
Vickers, 22, who plays the fiancée of Houston’s son, said audiences would not have to know anything about politics to enjoy the comedy set in the world of dodgy receipts and parliamentary panic.
“The gist of it is that the MPs are meant to set an example for all of us, but how can we possibly be the best we can be if the people leading the country aren’t doing a really good job?” she said.
“It’s so brilliantly written, I was laughing my head off. When I was told that Ben Miller was playing the lead I could just see him in the role.”
Miller is best known for his TV appearances as half of comedy duo Armstrong and Miller and in the BBC’s Death in Paradise. The play opens in May 2009, a year before the last general election, and follows Labour MP Houston in talks with a Tory grandee as he prepares to switch to the Tories to save his seat — when the expenses scandal breaks.
Dan Patterson, 53, who created Mock the Week and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, said the latest revelations over the current expenses bills and that many MPs were still employing family members suggested that the theme was still “the politics of now”.
He said he was inspired by how many MPs were trying to conceal what they had done and the panic that ensued when they were found out, he said.
“I thought that was what farce was about. In Fawlty Towers, Basil is always doing something and then pretending he’s doing something else. And I think there is something in the British psyche that we like to ridicule politicians.”
Patterson’s co-writer Swash has plenty of experience in ridiculing politicians because he has been a joke writer for Have I Got News For You and worked with Patterson on Mock the Week.
The Duck House will run at the Vaudeville Theatre from November 27 to March 29. For details, visit the-duck-house.co.uk
