Boris the Third: ‘The show is asking: can a clown be king and can a king be a clown?’
Actor Harry Kershaw is stepping into the shoes of Boris Johnson this month. He tells Fergus Morgan about how, alongside writer Adam Meggido, he plans ensure their political comedy about the outgoing prime minister stays relevant
There is an annual anxiety for comedians at the Edinburgh Fringe during politically turbulent times that their show cannot keep up with current affairs: that their satire goes stale, their punchlines pass their sell-by dates. For the team behind Boris the Third, though, this is less of an issue than one might think.
Yes, the show centres on the country’s outgoing prime minister, but it is about his murky past, rather than his political present. Running at Pleasance Courtyard for the duration of the festival, the show is a comedic recreation of a school play that Boris Johnson starred in as a teenager, which draws parallels between his disastrous attempt to play Richard III and his three years in Downing Street.
“Adam Meggido, our writer and director, heard this story of an 18-year-old Boris playing Richard III when he was at Eton,” says actor Harry Kershaw, who plays Johnson. “We have made a lot of stuff up, of course. We know for sure that it happened, though, that he didn’t learn his lines, that he pasted the script on pillars around the stage and somehow rambled his way through.”
The beauty of focusing on the past rather than the present means that Boris the Third sits on slightly firmer ground than, say, political stand-up, continues Kershaw. Nevertheless, the comedy’s creative team is expecting to make some edits to the script to include references to political events during the show’s run.
“I don’t know whether his resignation will help us or not, to be honest,” adds Kershaw. “What I do know is that we are prepared to rewrite bits of the show to instantly respond to whatever happens next and to make sure it stays relevant. We have already rewritten the ending a few times, and I can imagine a situation where we will have to rewrite it again. It’s really exciting, actually.”
Up-to-the-minute political comedy has been at the heart of the Edinburgh Fringe for decades, ever since the satire boom of the 1960s, when Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore lampooned then premier Harold Macmillan and other public figures in their sketch show Beyond the Fringe. Good satire, says Kershaw, always has a serious point underneath the silliness.
“There are a lot of laughs, as you’d expect, but it also goes a lot deeper into a debate about the nature of leadership,” he explains. “It is dramatic and funny, but at its heart it is asking whether a clown can be king and whether a king can be a clown, and what happens when one is.”
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In recent years, we have seen a plethora of Edinburgh Fringe shows attempt to skewer two politicians in particular: Donald Trump and Johnson. In 2019, it seemed as if every other performer was sporting a bright blond wig of some sort. Since the former’s defenestration, though, the latter has reigned supreme, and Kershaw has been tasked with the challenge of portraying him here.
“There are certain things than an audience expects from someone playing Johnson, like the hair and the voice and the flowery language,” he says. “He throws words like ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Orwellian’ into interviews all the time. That said, impersonations are fun and impressive, but only for so long. If you want to take the character deeper, you have to do a bit more than that.”
“There’s so much Johnson material out there to work with,” Kershaw continues. “I’ve watched all the episodes of Have I Got News for You that he did multiple times. My girlfriend bought me headphones so she wouldn’t have to hear his voice all the time. I’ve found saying the word ‘blue’ as Boris is very helpful to quickly get me into character.”
Like Johnson in Richard III, Kershaw is no stranger to appearing in plays that go wrong. Born in 1988, he grew up in London, studied at LAMDA for a year, then RADA for three more. It was at LAMDA that he met Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, and co-founded the company Mischief Theatre, creators of the extraordinarily successful Goes Wrong series of shows, including the West End hit The Play That Goes Wrong.
Along with Meggido and co-star Matt Cavendish, Kershaw has been heavily involved with Mischief over the years and is even appearing in the company’s fringe improv show Mischief Movie Night at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, alongside his daily performances as Johnson. “Boris the Third isn’t a Mischief show,” Kershaw explains. “But it has quite a lot of Mischief in it.”
Amid all this amusing activity, though, is a genuine concern: is it acceptable to produce a comedy about Johnson at all? Doesn’t making light of his ambition, his unpreparedness and his bluster – the very tools he has traded on to reach the top – in a fringe show diminish the seriousness of some of his actions, or even play into his own makeshift mythology?
“The truth is that I don’t know,” answers Kershaw. “There have been so many theatre and TV shows about Johnson, though, and the reason for that is that, love him or hate him, he is at the heart of Britain and everyone knows who he is. Whether it is a good idea or a bad idea to do another one, I guess we will find out.”
Boris the Third runs at Pleasance Courtyard until August 29. For more: tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/boris-the-third
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