Brexit, Pleasance, Edinburgh Fringe

Zugzwang : noun Chess - a situation in which a player is limited to moves that cost pieces or have a damaging positional effect.

Brexit is set 2 years and a bit on from the present.  The post-EU membership transitional arrangements have been in place for more than a year and a half and seemingly endless negotiations continue as to how to bring them to a close.  Yet another Tory leadership contest has produced a new UK Prime Minister, Adam Masters (Timothy Bentinck), who has to find a way through an increasing clogged minefield.  His close friend and political adviser Paul Connell (Mike McShane) tells him he has to make a clear decision - leave the EU completely, or remain in the EU enthusiastically.  But all that Masters can see is Zugzwang - a word that crops up a lot throughout the play.

So, in best Tory tradition, he tries to fudge a compromise by appointing committed Leaver Simon Cavendish (Hal Cruttenden) as Trade Secretary, committed Remainer Diana Purdy (Pippa Evans) as Brexit Secretary.  Both swiftly drop inches thick proposals on his desk, with diametrically opposed objectives.  That decision just won't go away....

The fifth player in the game is the one holding all the aces.  Helena Brandt (Jo Caulfield) is the chief EU negotiator, still trying to exercise patience with a UK that can never decide what it actually wants, frustrated by the 'frenetic inaction' that characterises everything the Tory government does.

Masters wants to listen to everybody, wants to have their advice, doesn't want to act upon any of it.  Because whatever he does will leave his reputation in shreds, whether it's by trashing the economy or overriding the mythical 'will of the people'.  While the only voice of sense, world weary as it is, comes from Brandt.  The dramatic tension is clear, the resolution as murky as ever.  But, as in real life, it's Caulfield's character that has the final words.

Good performances all round.   Bentinck plays it for laughs, because who would take him seriously anyway, and lets the action revolve around his hopelessness.  Cruttenden gets to play the smug, supercilious ideological fanatic with family connections to royalty and a fondness for classical Greek references (who could he possibly be thinking of?) and seems made for the role, if never becoming quite as irritating as his real life models.  Evans is bustling pragmatism, as blinkered as her cabinet colleague but a bit more likeable.  While Caulfield's calming presence, in a suitably Euro-vague accent, refuses to be drawn into the arguments.  My pick of the bunch though was McShane, ostensibly sensible but with the political machinator's deviousness and sense of survival.

All credit to the writers (Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky) for having a go, but how do you satirise something that is already beyond satire, that is already more confused, incompetent, indecisive, divisive and damaging than would seem credible in a piece of fiction?  So Brexit doesn't really tell us anything new, for there is nothing really knowable any more, but it's always enjoyable, manages a good sprinkling of laughs, and pokes fun at this incompetent government.  And well done for identifying zugzwang as the perfect descriptor for the poisoned chalice that the ill-advised referendum has left to Cameron's hapless successors.

Brexit is on at the Pleasance at 13.30 until 26 August.