Film Editor Jess Parker interviews Harry Hill and Steve Brown ahead of the arrival of Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera to Birmingham in June
I’m really looking forward to when the show comes to the Birmingham Rep in June. For our readers who might not have been able to catch the show’s original run or the tour yet, in your own words, how would you describe Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera? What can audiences expect?
Steve: Shall I keep it short? Well, it’s a Rock Opera largely by name, but it gives a hint of the musical mix that we use. It goes pretty much all over the place musically. But it’s a political satire. It’s broader politics rather than concentrating on whether you are red, blue, or even orange.
Harry: We’ve got a band on stage with the performers. It’s about Tony Blair, Britain’s most successful Labour prime minister, but really it’s an excuse for a lot of fun. The emphasis is on a lot of laughs, certainly in the first half. The first half sees Tony swept to victory in 1997, and then, probably before a lot of your readers will remember.
Probably yes!
Harry: Yeah maybe slightly! The second half is post-9/11. So we meet the so-called baddies, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, and George Bush… we see how Tony gets drunk on power and commits us to war. In the end, it’s sort of turned on the audience. He sort of turns to the audience and asks “Whose fault is this?”, because the truth is he was voted in after the war in Iraq started, and a lot more people voted for him.
Steve: He couldn’t vote himself in, could he?
Harry: He couldn’t vote himself in. And then at the end, he sort of says, “If I was to say sorry would you have me back?”. There’s a weird moment at the end where people are thinking, compared to the last few years, “How bad could that be?”. It’s a curious idea, and when we first started writing it that wasn’t really the idea. It kind of developed.
What would you say the original idea was before it developed?
Harry: Really it was just that this is a good story; Tony Blair’s story is a good story. I thought it would start with him being born and it would end with him dying. You know, it starts with him on his deathbed confessing to a priest. But actually, Steve wrote this song at the end that draws it all together and makes it more about asking if we can ever get the leaders that we deserve. When Tony Blair stood for office his USP was that he was young; he was relatively good-looking; and he felt like a fresh face with fresh ideas.
Steve: It felt different, you know. We’d had 14 years of ‘Tory misrule’ and it was going to be a brand new start. Hopes were high and it was a feeling that we had this young guy and he would understand younger people better than had previously been the experience. Hopes were incredibly high. Not only is 1997 merely a date for most of your readers but also most of them will only have a conscious memory of living under a Tory government.
Exactly, and similarly, it feels especially apparent that this is a moment of change, and really a perfect time for a show like this to be touring around the country.
Harry: It does feel like that, and it’s not deliberate. We had the idea maybe five years ago, but it’s funny, that has kind of helped us. And I think there’s a level of nostalgia for that time. Not just for new Labour but nostalgia for the late 90s. One eye on TV and culture, there’s lots of ‘best of 90s’ type stuff and it seems to be in the air.
Steve: That period was revenant in a way of the 60s where the concept of the teenager had only really emerged in the late 50s. In the 60s, as we all know, we went from black and white into colour and I don’t just mean in television, I mean in real life. The youth had disposable income, and there was Carnaby Street. London was it, and England was swinging. We had all the music and the fashion. It was a very optimistic time.
The absurd and silly is my stock in trade, and I’ve never been out to offend anyone
Considering the show’s harder-hitting themes, Tony! has received a lot of attention from both press and audiences for its use of humour when addressing serious political issues. Can you talk about the role of comedy in the show, and how you found a healthy balance of satire and more serious themes in the show’s stand-up-ish comedic approach?
Harry: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, my background is in silly stuff. The absurd and silly is my stock in trade, and I’ve never been out to offend anyone. So it’s always been important to the pair of us to tread that line carefully. And when we were doing it, you can sense straight away if we got it wrong. You can just feel it. It’s not an audible gasp but you can just feel everyone stiffen up. But I think there is something exciting when you do get it right, that feeling in the audience of “how are they going to deal with this?”. You know, the death of Princess Diana; the war in Iraq; 9/11. So, it is kind of exciting if you can get it right. We approached it cautiously.
Steve: Those elements emerged during the process. I think it’s almost always a mistake if you’re just getting laughs all the time. You can have a serious drama, but if it’s not leavened at all with any humour I think that’s a drudge. And similarly, if you have no moment of respite it’s completely exhausting. We’re dealing with war at one point in this, and we have to let that stand. It’s a real shock because it’s all been knockabout humour and suddenly everybody is standing there as the bombs begin to fall and there is nothing but a deafening noise. The funnier the rest of the show has been, a serious moment like that really lands. It’s a good trick to be able to pull out of the bag.
The funnier the rest of the show has been, a serious moment like that really lands. It’s a good trick to be able to pull out of the bag
Yes, with those clear moments of contrast. It feels reminiscent of Cabaret, with comedy heightening the fall.
Harry: That’s a good reference. The truth is that times are tough at the moment and we haven’t got a huge budget, but there’s a way of turning that into an advantage. Often when you go to the West End you feel like they’re trying to recreate a film. You can see any of these franchise-type things, and that goes so far, but I think there’s something quite exciting as seeing the same person playing John Prescott as is playing Osama Bin Laden.
It feels like Tony! is harking back to a Brechtian theatrical style, with its heightened themes of war and public unrest.
Steve: Well, funnily enough, there’s a joke where we reference The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Brecht. We saw a parallel in that: that it was somebody rising, as the title might suggest, to a place of unstoppable power, and what the results of that are. At that point, we make global points rather than just pointing the finger at Blair. But yes, the Brechtian thing is good. I’m a big one to rally constantly against literalism in theatre. Sometimes it’s great; I did see the Harry Potter thing (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) on stage because a friend of mine was in the original production and it was brilliant. It was absolutely fantastic, but it was more like a cross between a theatre and a theme park.
Just to close, are there any final words for our readers to draw them into something that follows events that, as you say, they weren’t around for?
Harry: They’ll learn a lot, and they’ll laugh a lot. And I’ll defy anyone not to come out of it singing the final song.
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