From a distance Kenneth Branagh, the undoubted star of Michael Winterbottom’s pandemic drama This England, does indeed resemble Boris Johnson: behold the striding stoop, the gibbon arm-swing, the head always tipped down slightly, almost as if he’s half expecting a slap to the face. And of course, the blonde mop, now rapidly thinning. But move closer, and the effect is somewhat lost. Now the actor looks more like Johnson’s father, Stanley, after a bad facelift – though this is not as comical as it sounds. The prosthetics make Johnson seem pathetic, in the fullest sense of that word: vulnerable, inadequate, enfeebled. From this spongy pinkness a pair of tiny eyes peer out. They plead for understanding, for courage, for a brief respite from the awful business of being oneself.
Has Winterbottom been too kind to Johnson? Perhaps. This England’s script may be merciless at points, but it also pays almost as much attention to the prime minister’s seeming loneliness as it does to his government’s ugly and egregious failures in the face of Covid 19. Johnson, by this telling, has no true friends, a stupid and self-obsessed fiancée (a delicious performance by Ophelia Lovibond) to whom he cannot really talk, and adult children who refuse to take his telephone calls. Around him, as if in a play by Shakespeare, the subject of his long overdue book, the cast divides roughly into plotters and anarchists; even his Jack Russell, Dilyn, is against him, an un-biddable beast. Lee Cain (Derek Barr), the tabloid hack who was director of communications at Downing Street, is depicted as a yob, and Dominic Cummings (Simon Paisley Day) as a whispering henchman, forever dripping poison into ears. As for fools, there are several worthy of jester bells, but let us plump in the first instance for Matt Hancock, the randy little health secretary, brilliantly impersonated by Andrew Buchan. The steepled fingers, the piping voice, the middle-management self importance: he has quietly caught them all.
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