Is it too soon to joke about the Queen? I couldn’t possibly comment, but those of a sensitive disposition should take a look at the warning for audiences on the theatre’s website. It runs 20 words longer than the show description.
The monarchy is the least of it – although there is a tarantula called Camilla and a gasp-inducing Diana gag. There are also off-colour remarks about disability, sexuality and race. And let’s not forget the swearing.
The irony is that Samson Hawkins’s debut play is a big, happy mainstream comedy. If anyone does take offence at its equal-opportunities upturning of intolerance and liberalism, they will be badly missing the point.
That point lies somewhere between Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and Daisy May Cooper’s This Country. The play is set in the Northamptonshire village of Syresham where, as the playwright imagines it, compulsory purchase orders threaten to tear apart a 1,000-year-old settlement to make way for HS2.
Like Butterworth’s play, Village Idiot has serious questions to ask about identity, nostalgia and modernity. Like Cooper’s sitcom, it has a very funny love-hate relationship with rural life.
What Hawkins captures with slippery brilliance is the community’s contradictory combination of discrimination in theory and acceptance in practice. The villagers might be suspicious of townies, resistant to modernity and hopeless on the language of inclusion, but they also take each other for who they are.
In this Ramps on the Moon co-production, everybody is at risk of being picked on. Debbie (Faye Wiggan) has learning disabilities, Barbara (Eileen Nicholas) depends on medication, Harry (Maximilian Fairley) is neurodivergent, Peter (Philip Labey) has a secret life as a Cher impersonator and Liam (Joseph Langdon) is from a family of Travellers. Even the patriarchal Kevin (Mark Benton) seems uncertain about the gender of his future wife.
If this sounds schematic, Hawkins never lets it seem so in a script that is witty, romantic and politically fresh. Yes, it is too long, but in Nadia Fall’s exuberant production, you relish the company of these characters, with their eccentric talent show and meat-based prizes. When the laughter subsides and the HS2 bulldozers move in, you are left wondering who the village idiot really is.
• At Nottingham Playhouse, until 25 March, and touring until 6 May
