‘Veep’ Creator To Bring ‘Pandemonium’ Of Boris Johnson’s Covid-19 Leadership To West End Stage

Veep creator Armando Iannucci is bringing to London’s West End his first play – a satire on former UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Variety reports that Iannucci – Oscar-nominated for his screenplay In the Loop – has called the play Pandemonium: Being a Scornful Account of the Activities of Mr Boris Johnson and ‘Others’ during the Pandemic and its Aftermath, which will debut at the Soho Theatre on December 1.

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The play will be directed by Patrick Marber, previously Oscar-nominated for his Notes on a Scandal screenplay, and a Tony Award winner for Leopoldstadt.

Iannucci is also hard at work on a new stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 political satire Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Variety quotes Iannucci, one of the UK’s most celebrated political satirists with Veep and previously In the Thick of It skewering the British government’s conduct, as saying:

“I wanted to write something furious and energetic about the past three years. ‘Pandemonium’ is partly about us wanting those in charge to be up to the job, to be heroes, and the anger that started building when the news of the drinks parties began to emerge. And yes, I wanted to write something funny (don’t forget, we also had Liz Truss).”

The notes for the new play describe: “A caustic entertainment for the winter months, a funny, wild, ongoing history play about how our great leaders grappled first with the Pandemic and then with each other. The Johnson-Truss-Sunak years told at a furious pace in all their horrible glory. Relive the horror! The Mess! The Murk! The lying about the lies!”

Johnson, who was hospitalized with the virus himself during the early days of the UK lockdown in 2020, was the country’s leader throughout the pandemic, but his tenure in Downing Street became increasingly blighted with scandals, including accounts of parties held at his residence while the rest of the country remained isolated, and he resigned from the premiership in July 2022. A government inquiry later found he had misled parliament, and he has now resigned as an MP.

This won’t be the first time Johnson’s behaviour during the pandemic has been brought to screen. Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart) previously penned This England, a TV six-parter with Kenneth Branagh taking the part of the beleaguered prime minister.

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