Regular playwrights for the Watermill, Ian Hislop and Nick Newman have taken AG Macdonell’s unsuccessful satirical novel The Autobiography of a Cad, published in 1938, and turned it into a play. Its outrageous central character, the cad, is Edward Fox-Ingleby, played with enormous panache by James Mack. His path through life draws similarities with modern politicians – Eton, Oxford, Tory MP, womaniser, liar, cheat, rule breaker, supreme self-confidence. Sounds familiar, Boris?

Helping with his autobiography are Rhiannon Neads as secretary Miss Appleby and Mitesh Soni as researcher Mr Collins. These two also play more than 30 other parts, all well distinguished by voice and body language and often needing very fast offstage costume changes.

Fox-Ingleby claimed to be descended from aristocracy – a claim that Mr Collins couldn’t verify. He also wanted to be seen supporting the army in the run-up to war but without putting himself in danger so he cunningly managed to become an army red-tab staff officer, out of harm’s way with a desk job in Whitehall. His unshakeable self-confidence triumphs again.

The uncluttered set, designed by Ceci Calf who is also the costume designer, allows for multiple scene changes by the cast while the dialogue continues. With so many scene changes, this works very slickly and minimises the impact on the play’s smooth running. A clever touch is a screen towards the back of the set which is raised and lowered as needed. Onto this are projected text, images and videos related to the action taking place in front of it.

Director Paul Hart gets the very best out of his talented cast. You probably won’t like Fox-Ingleby’s self-centred solipsism (Boris probably would). Despite the fast pace, the play lasts two hours twenty minutes excluding interval. This is too long and it becomes repetitious – some gentle pruning wouldn’t be amiss.

In 1940, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels read MacDonnell’s book and took it as a face value description of the English character: “the face of the people we must overthrow”.

Very strong acting from all three makes this a funny, intriguing and absorbing play. It’s on for another seven weeks.

PAUL SHAVE

Ian Hislop makes a stodgy mess of a superb spoof satire

“A shocking modern creation, and a truly monstrous one as well,” wrote the journalist Simon Hoggart in the introduction to the 2001 edition of AG Macdonell’s now-forgotten 1938 spoof memoir of the ghastly fictional MP Edward Fox-Ingleby. Macdonell’s mendacious, unscrupulous, blithely amoral politician, who merrily cheats, profiteers and bed-hops his way through Eton, Oxford and the House of Commons, had, Hoggart argued, any number of modern-day incarnations. So persuasive a figure was he that Joseph Goebbels famously believed him to be real, writing in 1940 that Fox-Ingleby “is the face of the people whom we must overthrow”.

To Hoggart’s list we might add any number of present-day politicians. Yet Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s adaptation resists ramming home obvious parallels. You might detect the use of a distinctly Johnsonian hand gesture in James Mack’s rotund, ruddy cheeked Fox-Ingleby or Johnson’s particular habit of emphasising discrete syllables. You might even argue that his irrepressible self-boosterism is straight out of the Johnson playbook. But as Fox-Ingleby lies his way out of Oxford, shamelessly evicts the tenants on his recently inherited parents’ estate, and cheerfully wheeler-deals his way through the First World War in which, naturally, he avoids serving, he mainly embodies an archetypal political ability to present every flagrant moral transgression as an out-and-out triumph.

Yet Hislop and Newman struggle to wrestle rewarding dramatic shape out of what, on the page, is an extended internal monologue. Instead, they punishingly follow the many, many picaresque contours of Fox-Ingleby’s life much as Macdonell presents them. Moreover, the particular pleasure of the original lay in Fox-Ingleby’s screaming lack of self-awareness. Hislop and Newman here have him dictating his memoir to an unamused secretary, Miss Appleby, who keeps pointing out that his sexual indiscretions in particular are unlikely to go down well with readers. Meanwhile, a fastidious researcher, Mr Collins, simply can’t find any references to Fox-Ingleby’s supposedly “very old family” from before the 19th century. The over-emphatic framing device flattens out much of the satirical piquancy – Miss Appleby’s sniffy “times have changed” feels as much an admonishment to the audience as it does to Fox-Ingleby.

MMack does his best to turn this intermittent running commentary into a dramatic virtue, in a gusto-fuelled performance that both acknowledges his character’s shameless myth-making while simultaneously imbuing his blatant fabrications with their own post-truth veracity. Like all the great stage villains, he has a conspiratorial wink-wink rapport with the audience that has us to some degree rooting for him – to be fair, a very Johnsonian tactic. Yet Paul Hart’s stodgy production struggles to make the political resonances land. Macdonall’s novel was powered by a bleak moral disgust; this overlong night is more in the vein of a strenuous jolly jape.

CLAIRE ALLFREE

Ian Hislop’s satire misfires

The Private Eye editor and Nick Newman have adapted the story of a nasty Tory toff’s rise to power but the result is more wearying than biting

He’s a ruthless Old Etonian charmer of bulletproof self-belief. He ricochets from one fiasco to the next, but only accrues more money, more girlfriends and more power along the way. He far predates Boris Johnson — Edward Fox-Ingleby, the cad in question, is the Conservative MP antihero of AG Macdonell’s satirical novel from 1938.

And yet part of the inspiration for Ian Hislop and Nick Newman to adapt the book for the stage is surely the way he anticipates not just Flashman, Tom Ripley and Alan B’Stard, but also our roguish former PM.

And don’t we know the trajectory of that story all too well by now? The multitasking three-person cast at the enterprising Watermill in Newbury is led with real brio by James Mack as the Cad. However, even on the page, where you have to see past the self-serving mock-memoir prose to grasp Fox-Ingleby’s true character, his unrelenting moral shoddiness can get wearing.

On stage, served up brightly with no shades of grey, it feels like a Harry Enfield satirical sketch (of which Hislop and Newman wrote many) stretched out to the length of a Shakespeare play.

We trek through the profiteering Cad’s happy times at Eton, then Oxford, then parliament. He keeps a slew of mistresses whose names he gets wrong, just as he later won’t remember his own daughter’s name. “I have been a victim of a succession of women,” he tells Miss Appleby (Rhiannon Neads), who along with Mr Collins (Mitesh Soni) is helping him to write that autobiography. And quietly tutting at his awfulness.

We can do that for ourselves. He dodges going to the Great War at inordinate length, however alluring some of his specious self-justifications (“civil duty before reckless jingoism”). Mack inhabits his man’s can-do attitude with such relentless liveliness you can almost see his appeal.

Can we care what happens next, though? Not when we know he will emerge from each sewer smelling of roses while ensuring his friends emerge from each rose garden smelling of sewage.

Paul Hart’s production has some fun with the staging: a hunting trip brings unexpected plumage from the ceiling; a portrait on Ceci Calf’s wood-panelled set comes to life. And you can feel the playwrights’ plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose pleasure when the Cad turns press baron. It has moments, but not enough to prevent this from feeling like an exercise in divebombing a fish in a barrel. And then again. And then again.

DOMINIC MAXWELL

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.

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.

MARK LAWSON

"superb comic timing... an absolute masterclass in character acting"

[The full review is on Newbury Today and will appear here soon]

NIKI HINMAN