A Walk On Part

[sir_guinglain]

It's just like old times - I'm writing in the middle of the night. This is because I'm only fairly recently back from London after a family-and-friends trip to see A Walk On Part at the Soho Theatre Downstairs, adapted from the diaries of Chris Mullin, MP for Sunderland South 1983-2010, by Michael Chaplin. I was told by one who has read the diaries that Chaplin's drastic abridgement successfully represented content and flavour. I thought the performances tended towards over-caricature at first, but they settled down, with John Hodgkinson displaying great skill in his portrayal of Mullin, effectively a two-hour monologue with interjections from the other four cast members, who shared ninety-six parts between them, from the prime minister of Ethiopia and a Northumberland landowner to a Ukrainian refugee schoolboy and a Sunderland newsagent, via Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and other players of the New Labour era.