The Autobiography of a Cad at Watermill Theatre – review

Private Eye editor Ian Hislop and cartoonist partner Nick Newman prove that mercilessly and outrageously funny satire has been in rude health ever since Jonathan Swift as they return to the Watermill for the fifth time.

Their latest work is a dramatisation of A G Macdonell’s The Autobiography of a Cad, a satirical novel published in 1938 that actually had Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s minister for propaganda) fooled that this was the real memoir of a posh Tory politician ‘that shows the English plutocrat without his mask’.

“Goebbels decided Cad was actual evidence that the Reich should take over Britain. Which is a pretty good review to get,” says Hislop, quoted in Prospect Magazine by Susie Mesure.

I could only agree as I reeled in equal measures of shock and pleasure watching James Mack’s Edward Fox Ingleby, the autonomous cad, dictating his memoirs to Rhiannon Neads’ almost inscrutable PA, clacking at a gem of an old-fashioned typewriter. The fun lies in the shameless (rather more than unapologetic) self-justification and aggrandisement spewing from the cad’s mouth. He gets away with bad behaviour at public school and Cambridge and then pursues women, wealth and political power as he stands for Parliament with unstoppable determination. Even designer Ceci Calf’s outfits for the cad shout as loudly as he does from the podium.

The programme includes references to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as you might expect, given they have both published memoirs, but this is possibly well above (or should that be below?) and beyond.

The third of the trio of actors is Mitesh Soni, who plays a stone-faced, straight-backed librarian with uncanny inscrutability, a formidable foil for the more than expansive cad.

Calf’s set is an evocative recreation of a gentleman’s club, all rose-gold shelving and doorways, utilising the Watermill’s own golden wood to the best possible advantage, especially as lit by Charly Dunford.

Both Neads and Soni play a range of other roles (there are almost 30 named characters!), with Neads as all the women pursued (pretty successfully) by the cad, as well as his long-suffering wife – mother of the baby daughter whose name he can never remember (even though it is simply ‘Ann’). Sharing this wild yet well-judged, over-the-top, comic melodrama between just three performers is particularly effective.

The whole production is directed with joyful glee and terrific pace by Paul Hart, artistic director of the Watermill. Don’t miss it!