Tricycle’s Ben Hur is magnificent in its superficiality – a masterpiece of nothing

It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing? Patrick Barlow’s new spoof, Ben Hur, must answer ‘No’ on all four counts. The show takes aim at two principal irritants: vain actors and the Hollywood epics of the 1950s, whose titanic scale was offered as bait to audiences besotted with their cosy new TV sets. Old Hollywood is a spent ogre these days and the foibles of the acting trade are hardly a threat to civilised life, so the show can’t embrace our immediate concerns.

But the execution is compellingly assured. The cast is led by John Hopkins, an excellent straight actor with a fine instinct for comedy, who glides on stage as Ben Hur and dares us not to admire his strutting physique and orotund diction. The plot unfolds with a wealth of comic effects. The dialogue is written in a pastiche of Shakespearean blank verse, which might become tiresome but the satirical genre itself is toyed with and mocked.