The Autobiography of a Cad review – Ian Hislop and Nick Newman retell a rotter’s political progress

It’s a bad week of theatre for Boris Johnson. He would be unlikely to endorse the warty portrait of his political idol in Howard Brenton’s Churchill in Moscow. And now, in The Autobiography of a Cad, an egotistical, Shakespeare-quoting, wildly reproductive Old Etonian and Oxonian Tory looks back on a public life in memoirs that prove to be unreliable and self-serving.

Some relief for the former prime minister is that Edward Fox-Ingleby becomes a broader portrait of privileged chancers in English public life. He gives a Sunak-like oration in a downpour, lounges on a Commons bench in the Rees-Mogg manner, suffers David Cameron and Liz Truss’s overconfidence about their political nous, leans towards the biographical inaccuracy of Jeffrey Archer and shares Prince Andrew’s appetite for shooting weekends (though not pizza).

However, this adaptation by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman of a 1939 novel by the Scottish author AG Macdonell faces the problem that drama typically forces a protagonist towards a moment of shame or self-knowledge, neither of which these sorts possess. (Johnson’s autobiography Unleashed has the same problem.) At least in the play, there is counterpoint to the torrential self-justification. Hislop and Newman, as alumni of Private Eye, are well-placed to challenge Fox-Ingleby with satisfying satire of precisely how he keeps getting away with it, through manipulation of the British political and media establishments.

Confidence trick … Rhiannon Neads, James Mack and Mitesh Soni.

In the colossal title role – in effect, a two-hour interrupted monologue – James Mack can’t quite solve the mystery of how such a chap gets so much money and sex but suggests how the confidence trick might work. Ceci Calf’s design richly fills every theatre wall with portraits of the cad’s ancestors, who Mack picks out with a riding crop like an oil-painting PowerPoint.

Rhiannon Neads and Mitesh Soni quick-change from main roles as the autobiographer’s secretary and (thankless in every sense) factchecker to other figures. She impresses as an alarming aunt and he as a college enemy who, in an Anthony Powell-ish way, haunts the rotter’s rise.

Macdonell’s England, Their England – which Tom Stoppard identified as a key book in his happy Anglicisation as a Czech immigrant – gently sends up the best of the country, such as cricket. Here is the other side.