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Interiors With Johnny VegasInteriors ★★★★★

By Dominic Maxwell in The Times Posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007

We are no longer a nation of shopkeers, we’re a nation of property developers. If we’re not stripping back fireplaces and slapping on the terracotta tiling, we’re hunted down by images of others adding value to their lives by doing the same. Thanks to Sarah Beeny and co, the boundary between home-making and money-making has never been finer.
Our living rooms? Lovelier. Our hearts? Uglier.
Hence this fresh, funny and affecting new show from Johnny Vegas and Stewart Lee: a performance piece that has Vegas’s character Jeffrey Parkin showing potential purchasers around his desirable Manchester semi. And, along the way, giving us a glimpse of the way he has gutted and whitewashed his own life.

It’s a satire on property culture in the shape of a house tour: one of those blindingly obvious ideas that is only blindingly obvious once someone else has been bright enough to think of it for you. We meet at a bus-stop rendezvous, to be handed the hyperbolic details of the £235,000 two-bed house at the end of our 15-minute journey.
Vegas can be an intimidating performer, even in a large venue – something his television work can’t always convey. But as Jeffrey he is not volubly drunk but wilfully bourgeois. “You don’t own a home,” he says as 20 of us congregate in his hall, “you belong to a home. Although,” Jeffrey hastens to reassure us, “I do own this home.”

We don’t laugh at Jeffrey – he’s too savvy, too good-blokish, too enviable with his pan-rack laden with Le Creusets and his coffee table hewn from “root wood”. There is no trace in this house of the ex whose departure has prompted him to move to Montenegro. But then there’s no trace of Jeffrey either among these polished floorboards and chrome fridges, or the pile of world cinema DVDs that sits oddly with his conversational references to “Top Gun” and “Highlander”. By the time the tour ends, with a sucker punch in the second bedroom, Jeffrey’s facade has peeled away.

“Interiors” is a bit scrappy in places.
Part improvised, part scripted, it lets Jeffrey’s subtext drift out slowly through the hour.
Yet the house, decorated for the show by designer Robert Thirtle, is really rather fanciable.
So we become complicit in this tyranny of tastefulness, giving real purchase to Vegas and Lee’s conclusion that a house is not a home without people, people with more on their minds than fitting shelves and fitting in.

Vegas is superb. Friendly but distracted in his smart-casual jacket and loafers, he sells the show’s metaphor with mastery. He is authoritative on DIY – “that’s less a wallpaper, more a dirty protest” he spits at a brown design pasted up by his ex – yet unable to repossess his own life. He is, in short, deceptively specious.
Stuff, this show reminds us, is just stuff — tasteful or not.
The stuff of life, meanwhile, can’t come included in the asking price.

Written by Dominic Maxwell in The Times on 6th July 2007. Filed Under: Interiors, Johnny Vegas, Manchester International Festival
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