Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Paratroopers
Thunk Productions
Genre: Comedy, Satire, Theatre
Venue: Just The Tonic (Caves)
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Frank Fletcher, the long serving MP for Cackby North, died recently and party members are gathering in North Cackby Community Arts Centre to choose his successor. However, there are only two candidates for voters to choose from, both more bottom than top drawer. Using the audience as proxy party members, the two candidates present their respective cases for endorsement.
Review
Frank Fletcher, the long serving MP for Cackby North, died recently and party members are gathering in North Cackby Community Arts Centre to choose his successor. However, in a situation redolent of “The Bishop’s Gambit” from that iconic BBC series of the 1980’s, “Yes, Prime Minister”, it appears there are only two candidates, parachuted into the constituency for voters to choose from, both more bottom than top drawer.
So, when Mackenzie Steele and Connor Banks present their credentials to those foregathering, how much choice do voters really have? One is outwardly confident, who can speak in cliches until the cows come home, so on message is he; the other not so, although is possessed of at least something resembling an electable vision. But they are both agree on one thing – that they must work in partnership to destroy the third candidate, who appears to be worryingly qualified to become Cackby’s next MP.
That’s the premise for Paratroopers, a fifty minute parody of the Labour Party governance and candidate selection process from the pens of Daniel Patten and Sol Alberman, that somehow also flips in a scene that looks as if it’s straight out of the Bard’s very own Henry IV (Part 1). Yep, the plot (such as it is) and script lean very heavily towards the absurdist and surreal. Not unlike today’s Labour Party politics in fact. Or any other in the UK.
Mackenzie and Steele (Alasdair Coulter and Daniel Patten respectively) both look the very model of the modern Labour general, resplendent in the bland politician’s uniform of tailored grey suit, white shirt, tie (red/blue/yellow/green, delete those not applicable) and black shoes, playing their roles with energy and conviction. And, as you might expect from any aspiring politician, they both work the audience extensively, one with didactic bombast, the other with caution bordering on the diffident.
But, as fissures start to appear in their relationship, so the rhetoric ramps up and the interests of those waiting to vote for their candidate of choice (us, the audience in this instance) take a back seat.
And that’s the challenge 21st century UK politics is facing, its protagonists ignoring the realities facing “hard working people”, content to hide inside their bubble, resulting in growing electoral indifference across the voting population. Politics used to be about theatre, great orators commanding the stage and speaking to their audience, not throwing cliches at them. And their oratory had substance, meaning and wasn’t the omnipresent vanilla flavoured, robotic twenty second sound bites demanded by today’s media obsession with the 24/7 news cycle.
The job of being an MP is one that requires no formal qualifications whatsoever. The candidate selection process is one whose credibility and fairness is being increasingly questioned given that the Blair/Brown model of “three candidates, two of whom are unelectable” that started as the 21st century dawned is now pretty much all pervasive across all major parties. There’s even the allegation that the Labour Party recently used Anonyvoter, software than offers the potential, in the wrong hands, to manipulate the candidate voting process.
And we wonder why British politics is sliding, seemingly inexorably, towards the gutter, populated almost exclusively by the on-message robot, lobby fodder for the Government of the day, having little to no experience of working life outside the political bubble.
To paraphrase Kipling, “what do they know of politics who only politics know?” Unless we do something about it, the absurdism that’s a core part of this nicely conceived, if slightly quixotic show will become reality.
