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Interiors With Johnny VegasInteriors

The Observer Posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2015

Across the city, under the auspices of newly formed estate agents Pennington Lee, Michael Pennington (aka stand-up Johnny Vegas) and Stewart Lee have devised an hour-long perambulation through a semi near Old Trafford with the title Interiors.

It’s a skit on the obsession with design and property which swerves into something more disconcerting: Pennington, as vendor Jeffrey Parkin, whose ‘design initiatives’ on the house aren’t quite finished, and who really wants to go into property in Montenegro, unravels – room by room, joke by joke – only inches away from his audience.

A wobble-spirited, wobble-bellied, Parkin, a more tentative persona than the abrasive Vegas, greets his spectators/prospective buyers at the door of the house (equipped with ‘liquid flush-toilet’ and ‘water-dispensing body-wash shower’). He’s all boasts in the kitchen, which has a fridge stuck with snaps of Montenegro, a weird gap where a load-bearing wall has been taken down (if it had been allowed to stay, half the audience ‘would be ignored’), and a massively eulogised (totally standard) pan rack, ‘modelled on sketches I did of the Humber Bridge’.

Things get a bit edgier in the sitting-room (unsafe gas fire, sofa with a grey blanket, standard lamp ‘for atmos’), as he works out which would be the best still from Farinelli: Il Castrato to project as a subtly teasing cultural reference on his wall.

They get desperate in the bedroom, where an unseen partner has unstylishly intervened: the bed provokes a raging riff on Ikea, ‘flat-pack paedophiles picking on the weak and vulnerable’ and a stretch of wallpaper gets attacked with a scraper – ‘It’s not even wallpaper: it’s a dirty protest. You just smear it on.’ They get explained in the final and only finished room: a perfect, empty nursery. It’s not greatly startling, this attack on consumerism, but it’s finely done, and it’s well worth doing. How did we get to the point where the word ‘interior’ always had a colour chart attached to it?

The Observer on 14th June 2015. Filed Under: Interiors, Johnny Vegas, Manchester International Festival
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