Corbyn the Musical feels like it comes from the heart. Did the writers live through the 1970s when the hard-left was full of hope and confidence? Socialists then genuinely believed they could see off capitalism (which seemed in its death throes anyway) and replace it with a happier and more equal world. The show takes that objective seriously and attacks it with style, wit and affection.
Young Jezza is portrayed as a sweet-natured bumbler entranced by an ideology he barely understands. He expresses his political dreams in terms of manhole covers and allotment vegetables. With his racy girlfriend, Diane Abbott, he sets off on a motorbike tour of East Germany, which they both regard as a communist paradise. Jezza gushes about a society where consumers are no longer ‘paralysed by choice’. They join a 12-hour queue for a breadstick and call it a new form of happiness. When a traffic cop offers them cash for their jeans he’s shot dead at the roadside by a Stasi officer. Yet the tourists, quite unruffled, see this as proof of East Germany’s world-class judicial system. Some of the jokes are complicated and subtle. Jezza remarks on the humble origins of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan and declares with certainty that an Etonian will never again occupy No. 10. The pair visit an East Berlin nightclub where they meet a sinister Russian spy, Vladimir Putin, who is secretly gay and conceives an unrequited passion for young Jezza. Then we fast-forward to 2020. Jezza is prime minister and Britain faces the threat of nuclear conflict with Russia. Can he persuade his old admirer Putin to grant him a truce?
This improbable scenario is one of the weaker links in a show that still has plenty to offer.
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