Review & lots of spoilers below

Ok. So, you guys know by now that I was, let’s say, cautious about several aspects of this play prior to seeing it.

I was completely turned around on one of those things, though, and this was the inclusion of music/dance numbers and an actual. Duet. Between dt and adrian. This duet was the highlight of my night. I know!!! That’s bonkers!!! I thought I was going to find this the most embarrassing moment of my life, and yet!!!!!

Let me be clear, I love musicals. I love plays. I don’t usually find it beneficial to the material when a play tries to shoehorn in a musical number. I usually think it’s best for straight plays to leave the musicals down the road to their singing and dancing, and just act the damn thing. Added to this, the fact that david tennant is clearly desperate to be in a musical lmao made me think, ‘oh god, this is gonna be a disaster, he can’t sing, it’s gonna be embarrassing.’ HOWEVER. I fully admit that he sounded good tonight. Really really good. DJ & Stan basically get stoned and sing a (brief, TOO BRIEF) semi-romantic duet under the stars at the end of act one. It’s the best point in the play, and no one is more surprised by this than me.

There’s another brief musical number in the play by the cast (not including dt) where you see a couple of real life, floppy-haired teenage dt photos projected in the background (none that we haven’t seen before.) I also really liked the tiny snippets of music from the opera Don Giovanni, which gave me the shivers. I feel like this could’ve been used to greater effect actually; if the ~moment of revelation~ and the ending of the play were stronger, bringing in those strains of Mozart could’ve had a greater impact, really set a nice tone of doom about the place. But perhaps there were practical limitations on how much they could use of that music anyway; this play is, after all, not the opera Don Giovanni.

Before seeing the show, I was also dubious about what I’d heard re: the staging. It’s quite a sparse set, which I think is fine actually, and there’s an absolutely ridiculous moment where david tennant flies into the air on a rickshaw (yes, really) which clearly made him very happy so i can take that all in good fun lol. Therefore, the only gripe I have about the staging has to do with the whole statue-coming-alive thing (yeah…really.) More on that later, though.

The third thing I didn’t think I was gonna like but did, was the hospital scene. DJ receives a blowjob from Lottie (played by Dominique Moore, who is very funny in the scene preceding this where she actually gets to speak) whilst chatting up the bride (or, ‘the fox’ as DJ charmingly calls her…) whose wedding reception he has just ruined in his pursuit of her. The logistics of it are frankly ridiculous - nobody could get away with that in a hospital waiting room lmao, blanket covering the action or not. There’s a large bag sitting on the seat between him and the bride, hiding Lottie’s ministrations from her, but the rest of the people in the room can see what’s going on. So it’s bonkers. But it’s also hilarious. I’m incredibly impressed that david tennant managed to offer up such a variety of expressions over the course of several minutes, whilst also having a conversation with the bride. Several times you think, ok, he must be nearly done, this is the orgasm face…but nope, he keeps right on going, and he doesn’t even blush. Stellar receiving-blowjob acting right there. This is the funniest part of the play, imo.

As always, dt’s comic timing is great. But I think he mines more laughs through his delivery and physical comedy than the writing actually offers him. He deserves much better material. This play is a comedy but I get the impression it thinks it’s funnier than it is, or at least it thinks it’s more quick-witted and worldly than it is. Admittedly this comes down to personal taste as much as anything. I did laugh aloud in places, but there were several times I heard someone a few rows back really, properly laughing at something I considered pretty tepid on the humour front tbh.

As I mentioned in my summary earlier, the staggering amount of alliteration in this play nearly made me lose my mind. Once you notice something like that - something repetitious in someone’s writing - it is so hard to tune it out. I know this sounds like a very nit-picky, minor thing, but it was honestly so irritating!! The line that’s been thrown about a lot in the promo stuff/reviews, ‘Satan in a suit from Savile Row,’ is truly just the start; that line is said by Stan, but DJ gets most of the excruciating stuff, including a dozen or so lines informing us that DJ cannot possibly be racist because he’d do it with, among other alliterative ladies, ‘a babe in a Burka.’

Talking of racism. There’s a terrible line about how DJ wants to fly to Alaska to have sex with a ‘furry little eskimo,’ which I didn’t find particularly pleasant or funny.

The supporting cast is very non-white for a West End show, so kudos to the casting director for that, but it is unfortunate that DJ’s brother-in-law, who I have seen described in a review as a ‘black thug’ (!!!) is the maker of DJ’s demise.

There’s also a really tasteless scene where DJ is interacting with a homeless Muslim man. This is the scene I was referring to when I said something turned my stomach. He dangles his £6k watch in front of his face and tells him he can have it if he blasphemes Allah. I’m aware this is a direct parallel to a scene in Moliere’s Don Juan (wherein he offers a coin to a beggar on the proviso the beggar concedes to blaspheme; interestingly this scene was removed from performances at the time.) But the execution of this scene is just so tasteless and unpleasant. Oh, and also dt imitates the Muslim man’s accent at one point. Grim.

Though DJ, in his monologue near the end of the play, riles against hypocrisy, he is so self-righteous in this scene that it’s almost unbearable; he goes on and on about how Allah hasn’t done anything for this homeless man, so why can’t he insult him (at first he wants him to call Allah a cunt, then he de-escalates to ‘twerp,’ neither of which the man does. Thankfully DJ throws him the watch anyway, ‘because of his integrity.’ But that this rich, vile, atheist man could shout in this other guy’s face about his religion…it’s horrible. Stan agrees, so at least our ~moral compass within the play (dubious) is on the audience’s side. But still, it’s very uncomfortable to watch.

For me, this was the only shocking moment in the play. Though this play is billed as being filthy and shocking, there is nothing inherently shocking or controversial about a fictional portrayal of a womanising, amoral, cynical, privileged white male with an excessive sexual appetite, penchant for prostitutes, and evidently an addiction to drugs and/or drink. Those characters are, let’s face it, ten a penny in literature, on stage, and on screen. DJ’s liberal use of the word ‘cunt’ might shock some in the audience, granted, but I think this play thinks it’s more shocking that it is. The language in the play is clearly something dt relishes getting to perform, and I am not offended by swearing at all, and honestly quite like hearing him going for it (apart from that one time he calls a prostitute ‘fuckface,’ not that she seems to mind.) But it’s sort of a bit laughable, that lines like ‘I’m just a cunt with an eye for one,’ are trying so hard to provoke laughter and/or shock, when…it’s just not even that great a line? A lot of the ‘funny’ lines are phrased pretty awkwardly tbh.

Other absurd moments:

DJ declaring himself a radical feminist. (this is funny because aside from Marber’s use of that word in this one instance, the rest of the play seems to take place in a contemporary world where feminism never happened.)



The statue coming alive. I hated this lmao. I mean. It’s all hallucinatory/figurative I guess (i hope??) because it’s his own voice bellowing from the statue that DJ hears, foretelling his impending doom and indicating how much he despises/fears himself, but the surrealness of the statue moving about and pedalling him into the air on a rickshaw, it’s just…it’s embarrassing



‘I’m not a rapist, I don’t grab pussy!’ getting a huge laugh. a) the bar is truly low when you have to say at least the dude is not a rapist, b) i hate donald trump as much as anyone but this is one of those poorly-phrased lines i mentioned that aren’t actually very funny. It felt a bit shoehorned in tbh.



Elvira, DJ’s wife, is an oddly-conceived character. I understand that reflecting the convent-girl origins of this character in the modern day was gonna be tricky, but the modern-day equivalent Marber comes up with is not particularly believable. Rather than a nun he’s lured away from the convent to marry/take the virginity of, as in Moliere’s play, in this play Elvira is a charity worker who, after a two-year pursuit, DJ has finally persuaded to marry him. The reasons he wanted to marry her are the same as in the original: she’s a virgin, and won’t sleep with him before marriage. Once they’ve had their honeymoon, he’s off to bed Croatian supermodels, done with her now that he’s finally had sex with her.

The suspension of disbelief comes in twofold: firstly, we have to accept that Stan and Elvira’s brother throwing around the words ‘she was an innocent’ and ‘she was pure’ (and the implication that she has now been corrupted) are likely phrases to be said these days. I mean, come off it. Secondly, Elvira’s speech - about DJ being terrible but at least he opened her up to physical pleasure! At least he showed her how magnificent all these filthy fantasies she didn’t know she had could be! She won’t be with him now she knows what he’s really like but she still loves him and always will! - all of that nonsense, it just didn’t ring true. Especially as we come into their relationship just as they are back from their honeymoon and he’s sleeping with someone else, so we don’t even get to see evidence of how he charmed her in the first place (she references that he was sweet and kind and acted so in love, but we never see these traits in DJ at all.) The actress playing Elvira, Danielle Vitalis, didn’t give a particularly strong performance imo, but I honestly don’t know how much of that was really her fault, given the ridiculous lines she had to say.

The final thing that rubbed me up the wrong way was the monologue near the end. The disdain for millennials from middle-aged male writers made a jump from online articles to stage with this one, or, if not targetted at that generation specifically this time, then at least at this digital day and age we currently live in. It elicited rapturous applause from the audience, and yeah, the ‘welcome to my vlog; today i bought a plum’ line was amusingly delivered, but I have no time for a character who is morally bankrupt claiming the moral high ground simply because he finds selfie/social media culture undignified and lacking in class. I might agree with him on his comments on the value of privacy, but this dude is shamelessly shagging his way through Soho (christ, I’ve caught Marber’s alliteration bug) and so I think his sermon on hypocrisy is a little tone deaf.

Are we expected to equate the unapologetic, relentless pursuit of ‘skirt, or occasionally, trouser’ with a life lived to the full, a life celebrating ‘free will and answering to nobody?’ It’d be one thing if DJ genuinely loved women, as in loved in the way dt’s Casanova loved women; a seducer and a bit of a cad, sure, but one who at least respected and admired rather than objectified women. But DJ generally seems to have contempt for them bubbling under the surface, and in any case, the only reason he is able to pursue this kind of life - one sexual dalliance to the next, a snort of cocaine here, a cigarette and a scotch there - is because his father is rich and can fund such an elite lifestyle. There’s also your typical middle-aged male writer cynicism about love dressed up as a philosophical, salient point about the unnaturalness of monogamy as opposed to the natural state of man being to ‘hunt his prey.’ Marber, mate - you ain’t saying anything new, here. Writers just like you wheel out this faux-philosophy about the hu man condition more times than I can count, and all it ever really tells me is that you wish you had the guilt-free option to have an affair yourself.

I say all this because it’s quite hard for me to decipher what Marber really wants us to take from this play. DJ is warned of his reckoning, promptly feigns contrition to ensure his father doesn’t cut him off, but feels no actual guilt or compulsion to change his ways. He then eventually gets his comeuppance, and Stan regularly tells us how despicable he is, but I still get the impression that, in spite of Stan’s warning, ‘please don’t be charmed, he’s not a loveable rogue,’ that’s exactly what’s expected of us. Indeed, Stan says at one point ‘just as we were starting to warm up to him!’ (I think after the homeless man scene.) But I…..was never charmed. Not even for a second. I don’t think anyone could be? Honestly? Because he clearly is despicable, he has no compassion, is selfish to the extreme, has received all the luxury and privilege being the heir to an earldom affords him, with none of the responsibility, has never worked a day in his life, and has only limited affection for even the one person closest to him (Stan, an employee he never pays and treats abominably.) As dt has postulated in interviews, DJ is a sociopath. And yet we are subjected to a lecture from him on the indignity of a world of selfies and vlogs and hypocrisy, as though those things, vainglorious though they can sometimes be, are more sinister and morally corrupt than his objectification and dismissal of every woman he comes across. It’s a bit hard to swallow, frankly.

DJ has great hair, tailored suits, tiny red pants, and the innumerable benefits afforded to him by virtue of being played by david tennant. But he’s never particularly charming. We never see anything of the kindness and gentleness that so charmed Elvira into marrying him. We never really see him seduce anyone, aside from Lottie (this seduction is essentially him groping her boobs in the guise of being a ‘specialist doctor,’ complimenting her assets and telling her she shouldn’t change herself in any way [she’d mentioned she wanted a boob job]) and the only other time we see him in a sexual situation is with four prostitutes, and he has evidently paid for their company. But we hear he has had sex with three different women a day for the last 25 years, and that he is ‘extremely fuckable.’ I mean, yes, to look at him, clearly sexy af. Yet I feel there was a twinkle in the eye missing for anyone to actually be compelled to go for it with him; for comparison, rather than returning to dt’s Casanova again, I’m now thinking about Tom Ellis in Lucifer, who does play a loveable rogue, and the contrast is pretty clear.

And I bring this up because I’m left here thinking: if there’s nothing really interesting about DJ, if he really is just one-dimensional, and selfish, a destructive man with delusions of self-importance, who’d ‘fuck a hole in the ozone layer’ if he could, then….why? Why are we interested in this man? Would we sit there and watch two hours of a female character doing the same thing? Would anyone even bother writing that, let alone consider producing it? I don’t think they would.

It’s an entertaining play because dt and adrian breathe humour into a script that is, occasionally, lifeless. They can’t save every line, but their chemistry is great and their relish for these parts is evident. The play isn’t as shocking or as funny or even as filthy as you’d expect, and I don’t think it taps into the moral quagmire it thinks it does; honestly, it’s pretty standard stuff. I still don’t know quite what Marber’s going for. Of course, there doesn’t necessarily need to be a ‘message’ or a twist or a social commentary to be figured out within a production. But I think if you’re adapting something that plays with the idea of a libertine repenting through fear of death/hell, and if you feel that won’t resonate in a contemporary setting, then the stakes ought to be raised in another way. The spectre of impending doom looming over him is pretty lacklustre, and, given that DJ would rather die as he lived than profess a simple apology to save himself, the ending isn’t very evocative at all - it’s actually a bit dull.

Best bits:

DJ & Stan’s duet



dt’s hair



stan’s endless exasperation at DJ’s antics

the hospital scene



the tight blue suit



dt looking so happy flying overhead in a rickshaw (despite the ridiculous statue driving it)

stan’s last few lines

i cannot stress this enough: dt looked super hot

Worst bits:

the homeless man scene



the patronising tirade against this vain new world

the elvira plot



the statue coming alive and foretelling his doom a la marley’s ghost in a christmas carol

the lacklustre ending

3/5 stars, could’ve been a lot better. with a different writer. and plot. 😂