Ideal
Salford Quay theatre
Live Review
14 years after its seven series run on the BBC ended the hilariously dark trip of Ideal is back as a vamped up stage play.Â
Suspended in time the world may have gone mad but the song in the bedsit weed interzone set in the crumbling Salford flats has remained the same.
Those years have only added to the compulsive dark dank trip built around Johnny Vegas playing the low rent, low key weed dealer, Moz, living in the mouldy, squalid, damp no man’s land of bedsit Bohemia somewhere in Salford.Â
Combining farce, a tight and crafted rapidfire script and two simultaneous plots running on two sets on both sides of the stage, Ideal is like The Fall at their most shadowy and observational, comically dark best. Full of the magic, murder and the weather of sex and death double entendres and a brilliant script, Ideal remains built around a cast of manic characters functioning in the twilight zone inhabited by the revolving door of the manic cast of fucked up characters.
Moz is as loveable and bemused as ever, and his stoned confusion is perfectly played by the ever brilliant Johnny Vegas, who, as ever, combines pathos and reality like a surreal bedsit Shakesp-hero into a zonked believability.
Stage left is the Moz weed den with the revolving never locked door that is always open to the cast of larger than strife eccentrics like the just out of jail Colin, the camp on steroids Brian played by Ideal creator and writer Graham Duff and Moz’s new love, Liza and her psychotic love rival, the necrophiliac Judith. Stage right is the sparse flat of much-loved Manc swagger of Psycho Paul and his mute comrade in arms – the Mickey Mouse mask-wearing mute Cartoon Head, and is the base of their new business – disposing of the bodies of the victims of gangland crimes.Â
With Moz now in love and lust you can only see disaster looming on the horizon. The impending doom-farce starts with eternal waster Colin appearing after a few years in the nick and his accidental getting out party that unravels Moz’s domestic bliss in a spiralling of madness and heavy manners.Â
Fluctuating from one side of the stage to the other the two plots intermingle in a complex and clever plot of intrigue and bumbling madness with farce meeting murder meeting drug psychosis meeting the dark side of pop culture. It maybe a walk on the dark side but Ideal never stops being funny and its crudity is its sophistication and the unrelenting script is poetic in its laugh out loud barbs.Â
Ideal is beguiling and hilarious and is a pyschic belch in the comfort of theatres and is art as the mirror and hammer to the world of twilight zone bedsit interzones we have all existed in.Â
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