”Winner’s Curse” review – Clive Anderson triumphs at the Park Theatre

“Making war is a dirty business. So is making peace.” Thus goes the advertising strapline for this unusual new comedy about behind-the-scenes machinations on the political world stage. But who knew that such a subject could also turn out to be so rumbustiously funny?

Writer Daniel Taub was the Israeli ambassador to the UK a decade ago so is especially well qualified to comment on the mechanics of international diplomacy, while his collaborator Dan Patterson is an award-winning veteran of topical TV comedy. Between them they’ve crafted a genre-defying, bracingly original piece that at its best recalls early career Stoppard with its dazzling mixture of elegant intellectualism, elevated language and low comedy.

At the centre of the show is one of Patterson’s television colleagues Clive Anderson, whose Clive Anderson Talks Back on Channel 4 is among the writers credits. Anderson plays Hugo Leitski (pronounced “light- skee”), a globally respected diplomat from the fictional country of Karvistan, which would appear to be a quaintly dysfunctional Middle European state stuck in a time warp somewhere between the turn of the last century and the 1970s. Leitski is here to deliver a lecture on his career, centring on a particularly torrid set of negotiations with officials from the state of Moldona (also fictional), which forms the framework for a series of playful but thought-provoking reminiscences and audience interactions.

Arthur Conti, in a completely winning professional stage debut, appears as young Leitski (nicknamed “Lightweight” by Korsakov, his bombastic diplomat corps boss, brilliantly played by Michael Maloney as a not-too-distant cousin to the late, great Nigel Hawthorne’s Hugo in the long running Yes Minister sitcom) in the flashback sequences. Conti, with his hangdog expression and understated delivery, makes a charming, entirely credible younger version of Anderson, and is already displaying the sublime comic instincts of a true clown.

Anderson isn’t a natural actor – on press night he wasn’t always on top of his lines or cues – but is an urbane, witty presence and achieves an undeniable rapport with the audience, even if some of the enforced participation (pairing everybody off to make mock negotiations amongst themselves, or a slightly pointless thumb wrestling exercise) doesn’t really add much to the play as a whole. The show really soars whenever Maloney is on stage, and gets a further jolt of manic comic electricity by the second act arrival of Greg Lockett as a bonkers American mediator that could have stepped straight out of Monty Python.

Stage veterans Nichola McAuliffe and Barrie Rutter are rampantly funny, and clearly having a ball as, respectively, a terminally mournful landlady with a surprisingly raunchy past, and the blustering leader of the Moldonian delegation. They’re both fabulous but McAuliffe’s lugubrious Cumbrian accented widow, forever either quoting her late husband’s nonsensical homilies (“better to bear a hug, than to hug a bear”), one hand constantly on the urn bearing his ashes, or out terrorising the local wildlife with a loaded shotgun, is a truly great comic creation. McAuliffe plays her to the hilt, and would be worth the price of a ticket all by herself, even if almost everything around her weren’t so much fun.

If Jez Bond’s in-the-round staging, exquisitely lit by Sherry Coenen, suffers from being stopped in its tracks periodically by the audience participation sections, the balance between exhilarating comedy and the deadly serious is superbly handled. You laugh (a lot) but you are never in any doubt as to the importance of the what these skilled, albeit highly eccentric, negotiators are talking about. There are a couple of uneven stretches, where the material and premise both become a little belaboured, but the running gags are a joy, the performances delight and overall this is a richly enjoyable piece of theatre.