“Richard Stirling takes to the stage much as we are told Jeeves shimmers into any given room.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Nae Bad)

For four decades, he was the omnipresent, supposedly omnipotent king of spin. And then suddenly he wasn’t. Peter Mandelson’s political career spanned the sudden shift from the ultra-curated analogue print and broadcast age to a more open-access knowledge economy. Before the numberless influencers of digital media emerged, Mandelson was the guy who knew, the guy to know. But was he?

Unlike a pharaonic-scale engineer – a Brunel or an Eiffel – there are no great works dotted through the landscape to look upon and despair – the crashing crassness of the Millennium Dome aside. This supposed supremo – a rather anaemic English edition of Hanna, Atwater, or Carville – made his presence felt on the Westminster political stage, but was there ever any substance to his misty-mystery – or were we all imbibing the post hoc ergo propter hoc like it’s Oktoberfest? Labour won a landslide in ‘97 after Mandelson had been peacocking across the quarterdeck for years; therefore, because of?

RADA’s own Richard Stirling takes to the stage much as we are told Jeeves shimmers into any given room. We are about to watch a powerhouse deliver a masterclass in acting up close and personal, and I am thanking my lucky stars that the ultra-Fringey compactness of Greenside’s Ivy Studio on George Street gives me a front row seat, knee to knee with someone doing something so marvellous. Here is a deep study in shallowness as the clock Marks 8:36.

Stirling (forever THE Boko Fittleworth in THE definitive Wodehouse adaptation) is the celebrated author of Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography as well as the playwright who penned A Princess Undone – the no holds barred account of one night in 1993 in the life of Princess Margaret. On reflection, Mandy seems like a rather appropriate addition to Stirling’s collection of biographical trophies – mounted on a bit too much tech, but stuffed with fine details that make this an authentic, lively, and blisteringly warts and all piece of theatrical portraiture – more genteel unflinching Gerald Scarfe than grotesque unrepentant James Gilray.

The format is largely linear, and it has to be to carry the weight of career detail, rival personalities and, of course, the sordid horror of the horrible revelations about Mandelson’s relationship with a convicted child rapist. Stirling, the actor, shifts seamlessly in the blink of an eye from his Dark Prince charmless to the affably unBrownian “call me Tony” of pre-Iraq days. Although the archival video footage projected behind is occasionally clunky, the use of actual newspaper front-page splashes from the dawn to the dusk of Mandelson’s public stage strutting amplifies the underlying message that the media ground beneath Mandelson’s feet was utterly transformed during the strange career of the self-styled Third Man – the camp TV Michael Reenie version, not the Orson Welles spiv monster who profited by doctoring children’s medicine.

A ton of research has gone into this magpie’s nest of a show. So has the honed and practised craft of an actor whose obvious natural talent has been sharpened into a sabre, one wielded with the precision of a scalpel from walk to full gallop. When the final penultimate chapter of Mandelson, and perhaps of the party he once mismanaged, has been written in the ballots of our next general election, I suspect that this script and its performance will have predicted much.

Come for the acting out of a political life that cannot help but be of interest to historians of the modern era (surely new error). Stay for the sake of one of our finest character actors doing his thang bloody chuffing well. DON’T get your donkey jackets on but do come see this!

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